- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
Comments
Anti-cheat engines are now requiring users to have Secure Boot and a fTPM enabled in order to play online multiplayer games. Will this decrease the amount of cheating, or is it a futile attempt at curbing an ever-growing problem?
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Its a game. Who cares!
Uncover the actual reasons… Reverse engineering of programs. Or some such evil thing.
“The use of a TPM enables anti-cheat providers to uniquely identify the cheater’s hardware in a verifiable way.”
How is this not a major privacy issue?
I also wonder why it would even be necessary for the cheats to run on the system the person is cheating on.
I also wonder why it would even be necessary for the cheats to run on the system the person is cheating on.
How else should it run? I can’t imagine a scenario other than some hardware cheats like a scope overlay for an unscoped weapon or macro keyboard/mouse, but maybe there’s something I’m missing?
I’d imagine you could do some sort of mitm on the video, network, or memory and use that data to cheat. Or, if nothing else, a camera with software to detect targets that connects to hardware connected to a mouse that causes the mouse pointer to quickly move to the target. Most of this is potentially pretty cheap in the age of raspberry pi. I’m not sure if anyone’s doing it, but I’m sure someone will find a way if software anticheat becomes strong enough.
This is going to be way harder, most likely even than to remove anti heat. And hardware detecting targets is not even viable yet, imo
It’s been a solved problem for a while now. High end cheating systems run in a way that’s 100% transparent to the primary computer. A second computer is used to either MITM the network traffic, or else it uses a PCIe card to grab the systems memory. From there keyboard and mouse inputs are first sent to the cheat system then relayed via USB to the primary. Video output is composited using a video mixer to draw overlays on the monitor. It’s expensive to set up, but there’s almost nothing that anti-cheat can do about it.
All right, that sounds like a good set-up. But you say almost nothing an anticheat could do against it, this again makes me wonder what horrific ways can be devised to detect this. Other than maybe keeping memory and traffic encrypted
For the network MITM just using encryption makes it significantly harder. For the PCIe card they blacklist the drivers and/or flag your account if they detect the hardware. It’s not 100% proof you’re cheating if you have one of those cards, there are legitimate uses for them, particularly for dev work, but game companies can be absurd with their demands as we’ve seen and refusing to run on particular hardware isn’t anything new for them.
There’s still ways to do things like snoop on system buses and such that can’t be detected, but you’re not dealing with off the shelf hardware at that point and the technical knowhow is extreme, so it’s a vanishingly small number of people with the skills to do that. When you consider the venn diagram of people with those skills, and people that want to cheat at games there’s pretty much no overlap.
I understand a little of that, at what point do the good/bad lists of keys get exchanged? Is the OS responsible for that?
That 2053 expiration date on the example key concerns me a little. Yeah that is 28 years from now, but people do run old hardware sometimes, like I have a 2003 Windows XP machine, not on the internet, that is connected to a CNC machine. I know Secure Boot and TPM 2.0 is standard now but how long with MS or the industry stick with it, and will they fix things before abandoning the standard and moving onto the next thing? Likely not.
I know this will help with security and anti-cheat, but I’m not that eager to run things in my BIOS that can prevent the system from booting if everything isn’t just right.
