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glitchctoday at 4:22 AM2 repliesview on HN

Almost all trainers from time immemorial operate in the kernel space because they require direct access to memory addresses. The whole cheats paradigm started with altering values stored at specific addresses. Alter the right value and the player character gets infinite ammo or lives or whatnot, and it went from there. Modern day cheats embed more sophisticated logic that ultimately boils down to altering locations in memory in a specific order, which brings me to my point:

An anti-cheat mechanism can always be defeated if the cheater can access a lower order of abstraction from the mechanism. An arms race is the inevitable outcome. It's either that or competitive gaming is not viable.


Replies

ButlerianJihadtoday at 5:14 AM

> The whole cheats paradigm

You are limited in envisioning a game where the client device is being trusted for ground truth about the game.

In client-server models, it is possible to limit trust such that many cheat modes and methods are impossible. Furthermore is the “remote GPU streaming” model like Stadia, which nearly obsoletes conventional techno-cheating, and likewise obsoletes kernel-mode anti-cheat.

gopher_spacetoday at 4:43 AM

I mean the assumption here is that administration needs to be automated. Cheating is an intermittent problem at worst on moderated servers.