8 ms·

A Message About Vanguard From Our Security and Privacy Teams

64 points by houzi 6y ago

ruialmeida 6y ago
This will always be a cat and mouse game. There are some anti-cheat software more intrusive than others. Even Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC) which is considered by many to not be very intrusive, used to intercept DNS queries to detect communication with paid cheats DRM. Most anti-cheats also scan all processeses memory and even files to detect know cheat signatures. They tend to run with high privileges and some take in-game screenshots for analysis. Basically they have permissions to do anything and receive silent updates. I wonder if statistical methods to detect cheaters result in too many false positives.
- blattimwind 6y ago
  > Even Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC) which is considered by many to not be very intrusive, used to intercept DNS queries to detect communication with paid cheats DRM. I was surprised hearing this. It seems like what they actually did was if VAC already found something, it checked the hashes of the contents of the DNS cache against a list as a second check. That's quite a bit different from "intercepting DNS queries". Overall VAC always made a reasonable impression on me as far as privacy and security are concerned (no SYSTEM services, no kernel driver, no screenshots, no scanning and uploading random files etc.), although this non-intrusive approach naturally limits the kinds of cheats it is able to discover. I feel like the approach taken by Vale is, on the whole, well balanced. Source: https://www.pcgameshardware.de/Steam-Software-69900/Specials/Steam-VAC-soll-DNS-Cache-ausspionieren-1109977/ https://www.pcgameshardware.de/Steam-Software-69900/Specials...
  - ruialmeida 6y ago
    Yes, thanks for clearing up the intercept part, I didn't remember how they did it exactly. They do make right decisions in my opinion to balance security/privacy issues at the cost of less ability to detect cheats. I think they also have a pretty good record of not banning inocent people.
lidHanteyk 6y ago
Folks should build alternative clients for Riot's games. Riot has demonstrated that they should not be trusted to write clients.
- catmanjan 6y ago
  Surely the servers enforce the Vanguard requirement
- sk0g 6y ago
  That is a lot more effort than re-building the game, isn't it? At that point, just make your own game, or easier yet, play another one.
  - learc83 6y ago
    I don't think it's a feasible plan, but there's probably some demand for that specific solution--people have friends who play riot games, so they want the ability to play those those specific games without the invasive anti-cheating software.
- Kaveren 6y ago
  Doing something like this would probably be illegal if you want to connect to Valorant servers or distribute it, would be easy for Riot to detect and ban users of, and if it worked well it would be a haven for cheaters to ruin Riot games from.
smoyer 6y ago
Explaining your rationale doesn't change the fact that gamers (many unwittingly) are potentially giving the keys to their computer kingdom to Riot. This behavior on a console would be completely acceptable but unless you're running a dedicated PC for gaming, I wouldn't install this software. As a thought experiment, I wonder what happens when the FISA court orders Riot to install a modified version on a suspected terrorist's computer. No need for privilege escalation when you can just ask the user to install it at ring-0.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
  > unless you're running a dedicated PC for gaming That's the approach I've been taking for a long time now. If you don't, you will always a) have your fun ruined by trying to be security conscious b) in the end, most likely give in and allow things you really shouldn't allow on a trusted machine because otherwise you can't achieve your task (getting a game to run). So I have a game box, try to make sure that nothing important ever touches it (which is a huge PITA when game clients insist on forcing email-based 2FA on you), but in exchange I don't worry too much about its security. That also fits nicely with games requiring Windows 10 and Windows 10 being so outright privacy- and user-hostile that I can't imagine running it on my primary machine.
  - dharmab 6y ago
    My next gaming PC will run a Linux hypervisors and use PCI passthru to run Windows as a full-performance guest. Then if I need to use a web browser, I can switch to a Linux guest without interrupting the game.
    - fendy3002 6y ago
      I wanna try this but PCI pass through seems hard. And with KVM win7 guest, I get too many cert invalid error during accessing https, which is annoying.
      - Sholmesy 6y ago
quezzle 6y ago
Whenever I hear/read lots of words about how secure something is and how strong their commitment to security I think “they don’t know what they don’t know”.
- smoyer 6y ago
  We should all admit that we don't know what we don't know. But the default behavior afterwards should be to assume that the software/system is insecure, fixing the defects we can find and surrounding in by rings of moats (defense-in-depth). When you don't know what you don't know and then declare it to be secure, there's an extra layer of indirection and perhaps a bit of hubris.
ds 6y ago
The inherent issue with anti cheats as compared to anti-virus software is user intention. A user who installs a anti virus program wants that program to do its job and find bad actors. The virus on the other hand is completely unwanted by both the user and the software- Its existence is threatened by all fronts. However, a anti-cheat lives in a extremely adversarial environment. The cheater (and the cheat) wants the cheat on its computer. As such, the user will be willing to do extra steps to assist the cheat. This makes the anti-cheat software in this case, the 'un-wanted' virus, so it has to exist in the most hostile of environments and somehow detect programs which have higher privileges than itself. That said, Cheating is something that will not go away. Years and years ago, I developed with a friend of mine a completely undetectable cheat for all games on the HL2 platform. It involved a second computer, which man-in-the-middled all network data to the client computer. This second computer then would display a 'radar' of where enemies were. As the anti cheat would have no possible way of knowing the existence of this second computer, there was not much they could do. If you wanted to get more aggressive with the system above, you could have that second computer modify outbound requests as well. So if you shoot your gun and it would have hit the ground, it will now instead shoot a enemy in the head- as such even something like a aimbot is entirely possible with this setup. However, there is indeed a anti cheat which can detect all known cheats and its basically what Valve did/does for CS:GO - Allow users to report suspected cheaters and then have the community analyze the reports. This catches all blatant cheats, but unfortunately will never get rid of radar/esp cheaters, only aimbots and the like. Honestly, it sounds to me like there is a business model in the above. Years ago we had companies like evenbalance/punkbuster, easy anticheat, etc.. which provided software based anti-cheat systems. As you would expect, most would by bypassed and a daily cat and mouse game would ensue. The solution imo is to create a SaaS where you essentially provide a reporting + monitoring tool. Users of your game can report suspected cheaters (which includes the demo file / vod / replay / whatever) and your trained wet-ware staff would review all reports and take action where necessary. No invasive software necessary. Actually, no software on the end users computer at all would be necessary- It is all done on another users PC. In fact, if someone is interested in doing the above, hit me up. Sounds like a easy win.
- DavidVoid 6y ago
  To my knowledge radar cheaters are now dealt with by not sending information about enemy positions if they are behind walls. It's not a perfect solution ofc but it seems like it works reasonably well.
SpaceManNabs 6y ago
I skimmed, but it seems none of this addressed why the service (edit) runs at boot-time? Also, expecting a service to not not look at your data if they have access is not security. If Valve can mitigate hacking in CSGO without such an intrusive service, I am sure Riot can. I, myself, did a very, very, very poor job with an autoencoder to detect anomalous matches in Dota and caught a large amount of players abusing the system. As far as I know, CSGO anti cheat does involve an ML component. My point is that a non-intrusive anti cheat, advanced analytics, and tracking of user feedback goes a long way. Ofc, none of this matters. If the playerbase actually cared, they'd boycott or stay away. And I cannot remember the last time gamers ran a successful boycott campaign. edit: Also read that uninstalling the game will not always uninstall the ring 0 anti cheat. I can't verify since I would never install this on my system, but for what it is worth: That is terrible IF true.
- Kaveren 6y ago
  I think a Riot employee stated that cheaters would try to start cheats before the anticheat starts, so the anticheat running at all times is trying to prevent this. CS:GO has a lot more hackers than games with more intrusive anticheats like Overwatch in my experience. Only solution is an invasive anticheat, machine learning, and trust factor systems.
  - SpaceManNabs 6y ago
    I have not seen anything conclusive on CSGO having more trusted players playing with cheaters than overwatch. My anecdotal evidence for both games also goes along with this.
- houzi 6y ago
  Hackers in standard CSGO games are rampant from what I understand. Serious players pay extra to queue up in a dedicated service for high tickrate servers and anti-cheats which I believe are rootkits as well.. not sure about any of this though.
  - SpaceManNabs 6y ago
haunter 6y ago
>we wouldn’t work here if we didn’t deeply care about player trust and privacy Bold message from a chinese company. People freak out about Huawei but Tencent is 1000% worse. And here they are installing a kernel driver on your PC.
- hellcow 6y ago
  This is being downvoted, but this is an important point. The Chinese government has repeatedly shown they'll work with Chinese companies to carry out the government's agenda. Do you really think that after 100M people install this kernel driver that the Chinese government won't lean on Tencent to gain access, or use it beyond its original purpose?
  - sbarre 6y ago
    So let me ask you a question then.. Do you feel the same way about Microsoft and Apple, and every other company that provides a hardware driver for a modern computer, and whether state governments (USA included) put pressure on them to let them advance their agenda by using back doors in their drivers or software? Why is Riot special in all this? What, in your view, makes them more likely to be so secretly and so deeply corrupted in the manner you suggest? Note I'm not asking you if you run MacOS or Windows.
    - hellcow 6y ago
      Your argument boils down to, "If one country has access, then every country should have access." I don't agree with that. It's clear the US has backdoors. That doesn't mean it's wise to invite China to add backdoors as well.
      - XMPPwocky 6y ago
        Where do you think drivers for your hardware come from? You know, the ones that already silently update through Windows Update?
      - sbarre 6y ago
swiley 6y ago
League of legends is a real pain in the ass to play even when you’re doing everything right. Personally I don’t even like the game, it’s just popular so I played it to hang out with friends. The way their launcher handles updates is crazy inefficient and so it always takes hours to launch if it launches at all. It also runs terribly in wine.
- judge2020 6y ago
  They recently improved their updater: https://technology.riotgames.com/news/supercharging-data-delivery-new-league-patcher https://technology.riotgames.com/news/supercharging-data-del...
- danaris 6y ago
  ...Hours? The longest update I've ever had for League of Legends (in the ~6 years I've been playing casually) is about 20 minutes. And I'm on Mac—not exactly the high-priority platform for them. Since they changed their launcher system a few months ago, it's been unusual to have to wait more than ~2 minutes for a new patch.
  - swiley 6y ago
    That's true if you update often. If you're like me and only played occasionally the updates would build up and take very long.
maallooc 6y ago
yeah, a chinese company will gain root of your pc to stop you from tampering with memory but it's totally fine guys don't worry
kerng 6y ago
Also worth highlighting, Riot Games belongs to Tencent.
butz 6y ago
Considering that client will always find a way to cheat, isn't it more logical to do all anti-cheat detection on server side? Gather data from trusted players during closed beta test and after launch just look for abnormalities on data coming from clients.
davidw 6y ago
I was concerned about the index funds for a moment...
dsr_ 6y ago
If people want to play games in anti-cheat environments, the only sensible solution I can see involves the reinvention of the cartridge. In this case, make the cartridge a bootable SSD which entirely avoids touching any other disk in the system (perhaps with the exception of an SD card or USB storage stick for saves.) The downsides include: - the game company now has to ship a complete OS and do hardware support. They nearly have to do that anyway, so whatever. - you'll need to reboot your computer for each game. The upsides, I think, are obvious.
- sbarre 6y ago
  The other option that is touted a lot is cloud gaming, with services like Stadia. There are outstanding issues to resolve there, like input lag and visual fidelity, but it certainly removes the ability to cheat at the system level by hooking into game processes and memory. Aimbots would be still be theoretically possible through MITM video feed analysis (as has been speculated) but that would also work in your cartridge scenario.
- nickflood 6y ago
  Or just ship on consoles with keyboard/mouse support. Current gen consoles have not been jailbroken in their 7 years on the market.
TrueDuality 6y ago
> ...some of you want to know more about the tech behind Vanguard. We can’t get too deep into the technical specifics without potentially compromising Vanguard... That in itself tells me enough about the efficacy of the system. Security through obscurity is only a hand wave of security. Making the trade off of all the security architecture put in place over the past decades for something that needs to be hidden to remain secure is a really poor value statement. I understand why they want this in place, it does raise the level of effort on cheating but there are other ways this can be accomplished without compromising a user's security.
emagdnim2100 6y ago
Potentially dumb question: how do cheats even work in a game like LOL? I understand aimbots in a FPS and how they can give a pure mechanical advantage, but the LOL equivalent isn’t obvious to me. Does the client have access to data that’s not supposed to be exposed to the player?
- kleinsch 6y ago
  Aimbots work in LoL too, there are champs that are balanced around lots of skill shots (Xerath) who you’d see hitting every single shot all game. There’s also a lot of scripting, both for account leveling or just to automate boring parts of the game. You’d see people afk playing their lane for 20 mins and not responding to anything happening in the game, then suddenly running into the other team for a big fight.
- Canadauni 6y ago
  There are still aim bots in lol because there are aimed skill shots for most of the champions. Scripting is abilities is probably the main method of cheating though. This anti cheat software is for their new game valorant which is a counter strike like shooter.
Youden 6y ago
As someone who mainly deals with web services, this all seems really weird to me. I was told from very early on "never trust the client". There was a lot of emphasis on server-side validation; client-side validation was only ever for UX, e.g. highlighting the field in red instead of making the user submit the form first. Reading through this, it seems the game development world is doing the exact opposite and pushing all the "security" measures to the client. Is that incorrect? If it's correct, does anybody have any idea why?
- banachtarski 6y ago
  You’re a bit out of your depth. Of course “trust the server” is preferred but many forms of cheats are purely client side. For example an aimbot that steadies your cursor on someone’s head or dodges automatically when a projectile is inbound. Maybe the client hijacks the UI to hide terrain and walls. I’m not saying what valorant has done here is right, there are other things you can do. But you’re oversimplifying the problem.
  - Youden 6y ago
    I understand that but it feels like there's a lot of focus on client-side anti-cheat while cheats that should be trivially detected server-side still exist (like flying through the air in a game where that shouldn't be possible). Plus, there seems to be a lot of focus on client-side anti-cheat when a lot of it could be addressed server-side: > For example an aimbot that steadies your cursor on someone’s head or dodges automatically when a projectile is inbound. This sounds like a similar problem to "like" fraud and things like that. Couldn't it be addressed by measuring the number of incidents? If someone is able to headshot or dodge at an abnormal/superhuman level, that can be detected server-side and the user banned (or flagged for human review). > Maybe the client hijacks the UI to hide terrain and walls. Someone mentioned a solution for this elsewhere in the thread: don't send positions of important resources to the client if it doesn't need them. Keep the client about as blind as the player. And again, you should be able to detect this server-side. If somebody has an abnormally high kill-rate for enemies coming around a corner, flag them for review.

64 points by houzi 6y ago

This will always be a cat and mouse game. There are some anti-cheat software more intrusive than others. Even Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC) which is considered by many to not be very intrusive, used to intercept DNS queries to detect communication with paid cheats DRM. Most anti-cheats also scan all processeses memory and even files to detect know cheat signatures. They tend to run with high privileges and some take in-game screenshots for analysis. Basically they have permissions to do anything and receive silent updates. I wonder if statistical methods to detect cheaters result in too many false positives.

blattimwind 6y ago
> Even Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC) which is considered by many to not be very intrusive, used to intercept DNS queries to detect communication with paid cheats DRM. I was surprised hearing this. It seems like what they actually did was if VAC already found something, it checked the hashes of the contents of the DNS cache against a list as a second check. That's quite a bit different from "intercepting DNS queries". Overall VAC always made a reasonable impression on me as far as privacy and security are concerned (no SYSTEM services, no kernel driver, no screenshots, no scanning and uploading random files etc.), although this non-intrusive approach naturally limits the kinds of cheats it is able to discover. I feel like the approach taken by Vale is, on the whole, well balanced. Source: https://www.pcgameshardware.de/Steam-Software-69900/Specials/Steam-VAC-soll-DNS-Cache-ausspionieren-1109977/ https://www.pcgameshardware.de/Steam-Software-69900/Specials...
- ruialmeida 6y ago
  Yes, thanks for clearing up the intercept part, I didn't remember how they did it exactly. They do make right decisions in my opinion to balance security/privacy issues at the cost of less ability to detect cheats. I think they also have a pretty good record of not banning inocent people.

lidHanteyk 6y ago

Folks should build alternative clients for Riot's games. Riot has demonstrated that they should not be trusted to write clients.

catmanjan 6y ago
Surely the servers enforce the Vanguard requirement
sk0g 6y ago
That is a lot more effort than re-building the game, isn't it? At that point, just make your own game, or easier yet, play another one.
- learc83 6y ago
  I don't think it's a feasible plan, but there's probably some demand for that specific solution--people have friends who play riot games, so they want the ability to play those those specific games without the invasive anti-cheating software.
Kaveren 6y ago
Doing something like this would probably be illegal if you want to connect to Valorant servers or distribute it, would be easy for Riot to detect and ban users of, and if it worked well it would be a haven for cheaters to ruin Riot games from.

smoyer 6y ago

Explaining your rationale doesn't change the fact that gamers (many unwittingly) are potentially giving the keys to their computer kingdom to Riot. This behavior on a console would be completely acceptable but unless you're running a dedicated PC for gaming, I wouldn't install this software. As a thought experiment, I wonder what happens when the FISA court orders Riot to install a modified version on a suspected terrorist's computer. No need for privilege escalation when you can just ask the user to install it at ring-0.

tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
> unless you're running a dedicated PC for gaming That's the approach I've been taking for a long time now. If you don't, you will always a) have your fun ruined by trying to be security conscious b) in the end, most likely give in and allow things you really shouldn't allow on a trusted machine because otherwise you can't achieve your task (getting a game to run). So I have a game box, try to make sure that nothing important ever touches it (which is a huge PITA when game clients insist on forcing email-based 2FA on you), but in exchange I don't worry too much about its security. That also fits nicely with games requiring Windows 10 and Windows 10 being so outright privacy- and user-hostile that I can't imagine running it on my primary machine.
- dharmab 6y ago
  My next gaming PC will run a Linux hypervisors and use PCI passthru to run Windows as a full-performance guest. Then if I need to use a web browser, I can switch to a Linux guest without interrupting the game.
  - fendy3002 6y ago
    I wanna try this but PCI pass through seems hard. And with KVM win7 guest, I get too many cert invalid error during accessing https, which is annoying.
    - Sholmesy 6y ago

quezzle 6y ago

Whenever I hear/read lots of words about how secure something is and how strong their commitment to security I think “they don’t know what they don’t know”.

smoyer 6y ago
We should all admit that we don't know what we don't know. But the default behavior afterwards should be to assume that the software/system is insecure, fixing the defects we can find and surrounding in by rings of moats (defense-in-depth). When you don't know what you don't know and then declare it to be secure, there's an extra layer of indirection and perhaps a bit of hubris.

ds 6y ago

The inherent issue with anti cheats as compared to anti-virus software is user intention. A user who installs a anti virus program wants that program to do its job and find bad actors. The virus on the other hand is completely unwanted by both the user and the software- Its existence is threatened by all fronts. However, a anti-cheat lives in a extremely adversarial environment. The cheater (and the cheat) wants the cheat on its computer. As such, the user will be willing to do extra steps to assist the cheat. This makes the anti-cheat software in this case, the 'un-wanted' virus, so it has to exist in the most hostile of environments and somehow detect programs which have higher privileges than itself. That said, Cheating is something that will not go away. Years and years ago, I developed with a friend of mine a completely undetectable cheat for all games on the HL2 platform. It involved a second computer, which man-in-the-middled all network data to the client computer. This second computer then would display a 'radar' of where enemies were. As the anti cheat would have no possible way of knowing the existence of this second computer, there was not much they could do. If you wanted to get more aggressive with the system above, you could have that second computer modify outbound requests as well. So if you shoot your gun and it would have hit the ground, it will now instead shoot a enemy in the head- as such even something like a aimbot is entirely possible with this setup. However, there is indeed a anti cheat which can detect all known cheats and its basically what Valve did/does for CS:GO - Allow users to report suspected cheaters and then have the community analyze the reports. This catches all blatant cheats, but unfortunately will never get rid of radar/esp cheaters, only aimbots and the like. Honestly, it sounds to me like there is a business model in the above. Years ago we had companies like evenbalance/punkbuster, easy anticheat, etc.. which provided software based anti-cheat systems. As you would expect, most would by bypassed and a daily cat and mouse game would ensue. The solution imo is to create a SaaS where you essentially provide a reporting + monitoring tool. Users of your game can report suspected cheaters (which includes the demo file / vod / replay / whatever) and your trained wet-ware staff would review all reports and take action where necessary. No invasive software necessary. Actually, no software on the end users computer at all would be necessary- It is all done on another users PC. In fact, if someone is interested in doing the above, hit me up. Sounds like a easy win.

DavidVoid 6y ago
To my knowledge radar cheaters are now dealt with by not sending information about enemy positions if they are behind walls. It's not a perfect solution ofc but it seems like it works reasonably well.

SpaceManNabs 6y ago

I skimmed, but it seems none of this addressed why the service (edit) runs at boot-time? Also, expecting a service to not not look at your data if they have access is not security. If Valve can mitigate hacking in CSGO without such an intrusive service, I am sure Riot can. I, myself, did a very, very, very poor job with an autoencoder to detect anomalous matches in Dota and caught a large amount of players abusing the system. As far as I know, CSGO anti cheat does involve an ML component. My point is that a non-intrusive anti cheat, advanced analytics, and tracking of user feedback goes a long way. Ofc, none of this matters. If the playerbase actually cared, they'd boycott or stay away. And I cannot remember the last time gamers ran a successful boycott campaign. edit: Also read that uninstalling the game will not always uninstall the ring 0 anti cheat. I can't verify since I would never install this on my system, but for what it is worth: That is terrible IF true.

Kaveren 6y ago
I think a Riot employee stated that cheaters would try to start cheats before the anticheat starts, so the anticheat running at all times is trying to prevent this. CS:GO has a lot more hackers than games with more intrusive anticheats like Overwatch in my experience. Only solution is an invasive anticheat, machine learning, and trust factor systems.
- SpaceManNabs 6y ago
  I have not seen anything conclusive on CSGO having more trusted players playing with cheaters than overwatch. My anecdotal evidence for both games also goes along with this.
houzi 6y ago
Hackers in standard CSGO games are rampant from what I understand. Serious players pay extra to queue up in a dedicated service for high tickrate servers and anti-cheats which I believe are rootkits as well.. not sure about any of this though.
- SpaceManNabs 6y ago

haunter 6y ago

>we wouldn’t work here if we didn’t deeply care about player trust and privacy Bold message from a chinese company. People freak out about Huawei but Tencent is 1000% worse. And here they are installing a kernel driver on your PC.

hellcow 6y ago
This is being downvoted, but this is an important point. The Chinese government has repeatedly shown they'll work with Chinese companies to carry out the government's agenda. Do you really think that after 100M people install this kernel driver that the Chinese government won't lean on Tencent to gain access, or use it beyond its original purpose?
- sbarre 6y ago
  So let me ask you a question then.. Do you feel the same way about Microsoft and Apple, and every other company that provides a hardware driver for a modern computer, and whether state governments (USA included) put pressure on them to let them advance their agenda by using back doors in their drivers or software? Why is Riot special in all this? What, in your view, makes them more likely to be so secretly and so deeply corrupted in the manner you suggest? Note I'm not asking you if you run MacOS or Windows.
  - hellcow 6y ago
    Your argument boils down to, "If one country has access, then every country should have access." I don't agree with that. It's clear the US has backdoors. That doesn't mean it's wise to invite China to add backdoors as well.
    - XMPPwocky 6y ago
      Where do you think drivers for your hardware come from? You know, the ones that already silently update through Windows Update?
    - sbarre 6y ago

swiley 6y ago

League of legends is a real pain in the ass to play even when you’re doing everything right. Personally I don’t even like the game, it’s just popular so I played it to hang out with friends. The way their launcher handles updates is crazy inefficient and so it always takes hours to launch if it launches at all. It also runs terribly in wine.

judge2020 6y ago
They recently improved their updater: https://technology.riotgames.com/news/supercharging-data-delivery-new-league-patcher https://technology.riotgames.com/news/supercharging-data-del...
danaris 6y ago
...Hours? The longest update I've ever had for League of Legends (in the ~6 years I've been playing casually) is about 20 minutes. And I'm on Mac—not exactly the high-priority platform for them. Since they changed their launcher system a few months ago, it's been unusual to have to wait more than ~2 minutes for a new patch.
- swiley 6y ago
  That's true if you update often. If you're like me and only played occasionally the updates would build up and take very long.

maallooc 6y ago

yeah, a chinese company will gain root of your pc to stop you from tampering with memory but it's totally fine guys don't worry

kerng 6y ago

Also worth highlighting, Riot Games belongs to Tencent.

butz 6y ago

Considering that client will always find a way to cheat, isn't it more logical to do all anti-cheat detection on server side? Gather data from trusted players during closed beta test and after launch just look for abnormalities on data coming from clients.

davidw 6y ago

I was concerned about the index funds for a moment...

dsr_ 6y ago

If people want to play games in anti-cheat environments, the only sensible solution I can see involves the reinvention of the cartridge. In this case, make the cartridge a bootable SSD which entirely avoids touching any other disk in the system (perhaps with the exception of an SD card or USB storage stick for saves.) The downsides include: - the game company now has to ship a complete OS and do hardware support. They nearly have to do that anyway, so whatever. - you'll need to reboot your computer for each game. The upsides, I think, are obvious.

sbarre 6y ago
The other option that is touted a lot is cloud gaming, with services like Stadia. There are outstanding issues to resolve there, like input lag and visual fidelity, but it certainly removes the ability to cheat at the system level by hooking into game processes and memory. Aimbots would be still be theoretically possible through MITM video feed analysis (as has been speculated) but that would also work in your cartridge scenario.
nickflood 6y ago
Or just ship on consoles with keyboard/mouse support. Current gen consoles have not been jailbroken in their 7 years on the market.

TrueDuality 6y ago

> ...some of you want to know more about the tech behind Vanguard. We can’t get too deep into the technical specifics without potentially compromising Vanguard... That in itself tells me enough about the efficacy of the system. Security through obscurity is only a hand wave of security. Making the trade off of all the security architecture put in place over the past decades for something that needs to be hidden to remain secure is a really poor value statement. I understand why they want this in place, it does raise the level of effort on cheating but there are other ways this can be accomplished without compromising a user's security.

emagdnim2100 6y ago

Potentially dumb question: how do cheats even work in a game like LOL? I understand aimbots in a FPS and how they can give a pure mechanical advantage, but the LOL equivalent isn’t obvious to me. Does the client have access to data that’s not supposed to be exposed to the player?

kleinsch 6y ago
Aimbots work in LoL too, there are champs that are balanced around lots of skill shots (Xerath) who you’d see hitting every single shot all game. There’s also a lot of scripting, both for account leveling or just to automate boring parts of the game. You’d see people afk playing their lane for 20 mins and not responding to anything happening in the game, then suddenly running into the other team for a big fight.
Canadauni 6y ago
There are still aim bots in lol because there are aimed skill shots for most of the champions. Scripting is abilities is probably the main method of cheating though. This anti cheat software is for their new game valorant which is a counter strike like shooter.

Youden 6y ago

As someone who mainly deals with web services, this all seems really weird to me. I was told from very early on "never trust the client". There was a lot of emphasis on server-side validation; client-side validation was only ever for UX, e.g. highlighting the field in red instead of making the user submit the form first. Reading through this, it seems the game development world is doing the exact opposite and pushing all the "security" measures to the client. Is that incorrect? If it's correct, does anybody have any idea why?

banachtarski 6y ago
You’re a bit out of your depth. Of course “trust the server” is preferred but many forms of cheats are purely client side. For example an aimbot that steadies your cursor on someone’s head or dodges automatically when a projectile is inbound. Maybe the client hijacks the UI to hide terrain and walls. I’m not saying what valorant has done here is right, there are other things you can do. But you’re oversimplifying the problem.
- Youden 6y ago
  I understand that but it feels like there's a lot of focus on client-side anti-cheat while cheats that should be trivially detected server-side still exist (like flying through the air in a game where that shouldn't be possible). Plus, there seems to be a lot of focus on client-side anti-cheat when a lot of it could be addressed server-side: > For example an aimbot that steadies your cursor on someone’s head or dodges automatically when a projectile is inbound. This sounds like a similar problem to "like" fraud and things like that. Couldn't it be addressed by measuring the number of incidents? If someone is able to headshot or dodge at an abnormal/superhuman level, that can be detected server-side and the user banned (or flagged for human review). > Maybe the client hijacks the UI to hide terrain and walls. Someone mentioned a solution for this elsewhere in the thread: don't send positions of important resources to the client if it doesn't need them. Keep the client about as blind as the player. And again, you should be able to detect this server-side. If somebody has an abnormally high kill-rate for enemies coming around a corner, flag them for review.