Comment by CalcProgrammer1@lemmy.ml on 'I had my fun' says hacker who used Call of Duty anti-cheat exploit to ban 'thousands upon thousands' of innocent players

Honestly, not even mad. Sucks for the victims, but we need hackers poking holes in kernel anticheats. Show the game companies that kernel anticheat is a waste of effort and maybe this horrific plague of gaming will die off.

Another option is for gamers to quit buying this softslop

It’s inevitable. You can’t make progress without several steps back.

The issue is that without it cheating is so much easier in many games. So then people just get pissed at all the hackers.

No, not really. That’s the point. Kernel level anticheat has no real advantages and is easily bypassed. It’s the laziest possible solution that only detects and blocks the laziest possible implementations of cheats.

Good game design eliminates the possibility of cheating. Cheats are only ever possible if you take enough stupid and lazy shortcuts that it’s easy to take advantage.

So what are these easy anti-cheat solutions that can detect aim-hacking?

That’s super easy. Aim hacks hit the same point. Record the event with the exact point aimed at to cause the guy (assuming hit scan system instead of projectile), and compare the last x number of hits. If the last x hits are all the same location(s), suspend or flag for human review depending on resources.

Alternatively, track last x seconds before the fire button was pressed, compare to last several shots.

Scripts do not behave like humans, they aim predictably. After x number of shots, you can always programmatically detect them.

First of all, I‘m not a fan of kernel level anti cheats either. I think your point shows the never ending cat and mouse game that game developers have to deal with. Implement what you described, catch a few cheaters. Now cheats developers add pseudo random deviations within the hitbox to their aim hack. From what I understood, the kernel level anti cheats aimed to abstract and attack at the single point that all cheats have in common. I am not up to date but I believe that single point is code, that is being injected into the game process, or another program messing with the allocated memory of the game process. At least that would make sense to me as to why such an intrusive implementation of anti cheat is necessary.

Anyway, in my opinion the gains do not justify it.

To your first point pseudorandom variations don’t actually change the method of detection or it’s effectiveness. Heuristic pattern matching as described will work until the movement and shots are no longer accurate enough or fast enough to matter.

To your second point, all anticheats do that. Kernel level anticheat looks at the running memory of all other programs. That’s the difference. It can detect and scan anything that is open on your machine. Got a Firefox tab open with your bank details? Kernel level anti cheat knows it. Running obs and streaming? Hope obs has active encryption for your stream key in memory, because the anti cheat can grab it otherwise.

If it just looked at the memory of the affected game literally no one would have a problem with it, that’s all anticheats.

Kernel level anticheat means you trust the entirety of your computer and everything running on it to at least the game publisher, if not an additional anticheat company.

Bots just get around that by adding random amounts. We learnt this with RuneScape lol

Also in a fast paced FPS they aren’t going to hit the same spot from the same position repeatedly.

I covered that, there is no real RNG. It will always be able to be programmatically detected over enough shots.

To your second part, yes, they will. They aim at the same point. Even if there’s variance in the points there won’t be enough variance in moving to the points that they’ll be able hide the unnatural movement.

Yes, if they offload all of the compute for anti-cheat to the customer’s hardware, then you are right for current operating systems.

Client side anti-cheat is not the only way but it is the cheapest way for the game industry.

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'I had my fun' says hacker who used Call of Duty anti-cheat exploit to ban 'thousands upon thousands' of innocent players(www.pcgamer.com)

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