this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2024
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Actually, I am.
Using rootkit anti-cheat is a shortcut that reduces cost for both dev time and hosting time at the expense of your customers' security and CPU. You also have to lay your cards on the table for those who are attacking you. It is not the right solution for this problem.
Authoritative servers. Never trust the client, especially with information the player shouldn't have right now. Look at behaviors and group players based on if you think they cheat or not - let the cheaters play together, no need to spoil their fun and let them realize you know they cheat.
People do some or all of this on the server now, but root kitting all machines to try to solve this problem to play video games is one of the dumbest approaches ever and we will realize it one day when a state level actor pops their zero day against a big install base.
This. Having worked on some in-house anti-cheat solutions myself, it absolutely is just offsetting the processing and security cost to the players. The attack vector of having such a rootkit running on so many devices is just not even close to be worth the trade off of catching marginally (if really measurably at all?) more cheaters.
But... have you considered having control of 0-ring software that runs on hundreds of millions of computers, that can perform targetted updates to change behaviour on just a select few computers, even interact with the network adapters unbeknownst to the OS.
I'm not talking about zero days popping up for this. But rather, this being part of the design?
A less nefarious application: The root kit anti cheats already continuously monitor processes. Say it finds a crypto mining one. It can request the instructions needed to search for a wallet and snatch that off.
A more nefarious one: RK is known to be in the device owned by the kid of a military contractor. Etc.
Trusting the client is a fools errand. So we are in complete agreement. I never understood why the effort isn't placed on server side. People are very good at knowing when others have cheated. They know this from information that exists on the server side, so with the correct classifier, the server should also be able to know this.
This is a big part of the problem, but it's not the only problem. If you do all of that stuff right, you can't build a responsive first person shooter. There's some level of trust you need to put in the client.
Disclaimer: This is based on my experience playing shooters and as a programmer. I have not worked on anticheat systems hands on.
We see less and less of the "god mode" hacks where players can send the packet for a carpet bomb and the server just blindly trusts it. Or the ludicrous spinbots that spin at an extreme speed and headshot anyone that comes into line of sight.
What we're seeing is increasingly sophisticated cheats that provide "buffs" to a player's ability. An AI enhanced aimbot that when you click gently nudges your hand to "auto correct" the shot and then clicks is borderline impossible to detect server side. It looks just like a player moved the mouse and fired.
The "best" method to prevent these folks from cheating seems to be to detect the system or the game has been tampered with.
Maybe the way to deal with that is to just let it happen and deal with smurfs down ranking... So these "soft" cheaters just exist in the "pro tier" where the pros can possibly stand a chance.
One strategy I have seen that I wish more developers would do is sending "honeypot" information to the game client (like a player on the other side of the wall that isn't really there but an aimbot or a wall hack might incorrectly expose).
Maybe the increasing presence of hardware cheats will result in new strategies that make these things unnecessary. I keep wondering if a TPM could be used to solve this problem someday... But I'm not sure exactly how/we may need faster TPMs.
I think by the end of your message you were starting to arc around a little bit to the right way you need to think about clients: as outside your security envelope. (TPM is a joke in my mind, just like client side anti-cheat.)
There are many ways to try to identify and stop cheating on the server side that have not been explored because executives have directed use of off-the-shelf anti-cheat because they do not understand why it is snake oil.
I thought this at first as well, but they have an interesting property.
They have a manufacturer signed private key. If you get the public key from the manufacturer of the TPM, you can actually verify that the TPM as it was designed by the manufacturer performed the work.
That's a really interesting property because for the first time there's a way to verify what hardware is doing over the network via cryptography.
Or, if I can extract that key from the hardware, I can pretend to be that hardware whenever I want, right?
Hmmm... I was going to say no because it's asymmetric crypto, but you're right if you are somehow able to extract the signed private key, you can still lie... Good point
Got some bad news. They already can do that. It's a very low effort attack too. Current TPM spits its key out in clear text. Funny right?
You don't necessarily need to detect the cheat itself, you can look at things like players having suddenly higher kill rates and put them into a queue for observation by either more advanced (more expensive) automation to look for cheating or eventually involve a human in the loop.
Even on consoles after a while it becomes obvious that you cannot control the hardware, let alone the software on the client side. Those are the very best argument for this kind of approach and they get cracked eventually.
That's true, if the player suddenly has higher kill rates. However, that doesn't work if they've been using the cheat from the start on that account. A sufficiently advanced AI powered aim bot would also be nearly indistinguishable from a professional player. Kind of similar to how Google created the CAPTCHA that uses mouse movement ... but had to go back to (at least in some cases) the additional old school captcha.