Kernel Anti-Cheat Is an Overreach

This article reminds me of Chesterton Fence - the author is complaining about something, without ever experiencing why it exists.

> Riot went as far as pushing a UEFI firmware update to Valorant players to close a hardware attack — the first time an anti-cheat has reached below the operating system to change your firmware

I don't believe Vanguard did this at all? It told users they need to update their firmware to play, it didn't touch the firmware itself.

> Cheats started in user space, so anti-cheat moved into the kernel to see them. Cheats followed into the kernel, and then below it into hypervisors

I think cheats moved into kernel space before anti-cheats did.

I’m actually surprised how a lot of commenters here are defending kernel-level anticheat.

The tl;dr from the post is that kernel anti-cheat presents both an attack vector for malware and a backdoor for firms. The former is already known to be exploited.

I don't know why comments here are so negative. PC gamers should be wary of installing this stuff, and PC users in general wary of attempts to lock down their computer. If game companies want a fully locked down PC, they already have one; it's called a console.

Since you're not a gamer sorry but your opinion does not means much, you don't seem to realize how cheating is a problem in online games, it's not just an inconvenience, it kills games.

what a goof. yes it's a privacy risk, but so is half the things people do on the internet.

cs2 is infested with hackers, arc raiders died because of hackers... many games I've played and loved are dead because of hackers.

> So I would rather share a match with the occasional cheater than run un-auditable ring-0 software on the same machine I use for anything private.

Yeah except that’s not the options here. Even with ring-0 there are lots of cheaters. Without it the game would be completely infested with them.

>it hasn’t stopped cheating

No but it has largely reduced it to where you can play competitively and not run into cheaters. Go play f2p csgo and enjoy a hacker in nearly every single game blatantly spinning in spawn head shotting everyone.

> I want to preface this with the fact that I’m not a gamer.

So you're prefacing it as someone who has never really dealt with the games you like to play getting totally infested with and nearly unplayable with so many cheaters in practically every lobby.

Its easy to think its something that's not needed if one never spends any time in the space.

Do they stop all cheats? No. Do they make the bar extensively higher to cheat? Absolutely. Even they point this out: "A DMA cheat is a separate FPGA card that sits in a PCIe slot and reads the game’s memory directly over the bus, while a second computer processes what it sees and feeds back aim and wallhacks..." Any random person can go run some executable they found on a forum, what percentage of the playerbase has these FPGA cards and a second computer to properly run these cheats? And even then, more modern systems can even detect these kinds of things.

Are there lots of problems with these anti-cheat platforms? Sure. Are they now often developed with ties to countries many wouldn't want have that deep of access to their computers? Sure. Is kernel-level anti-cheat overall as a concept overreach? Probably not for what a lot of players actively want. Players want systems to ensure everyone is playing on a somewhat equal playing field. Other than the games being rendered in the cloud I don't know any other real way to begin to enforce it.

> I would rather share a match with the occasional cheater

What if it wasn't "the occasional cheater" and instead was "nearly every match of every game you like to play"?

I'm not a gamer and I carry a smartphone with location services on with me everywhere I go every single day and I have an account on every social media app ever made and I never close discord and I've made every single purchase in the last 15 years on a credit card I got from fucking Amazon and I post constantly on this cool little forum just for us tech savvy hackers with all my personal info right in my bio and I know that the tiny little tech company Y COMBINATOR would never scrape this or my posts and I know this because the forum doesn't use much CSS (real hackers don't need CSS) and I'm here to tell you that checking cryptographic signatures on boot is a massive invasion of privacy and I will NEVER allow something insidious like that be installed on my hardware, EVER! Anyway, back to posting under my real name on Twitter and hanging out with my friends on Discord kek. I like Discord cus it's free :) I'm so smart.