Kernel anti-cheat is an overreach

https://nooneshappy.com/article/kernel-anti-cheat-is-an-overreach/

by zdw • 16 days ago

111 114 16 days ago

_aavaa_2• 16 days ago

So I would rather share a match with the occasional cheater than run un-auditable ring-0 software on the same machine I use for anything private.

Yeah except that’s not the options here. Even with ring-0 there are lots of cheaters. Without it the game would be completely infested with them.

bigstrat2003• 16 days ago

I would still rather have that than let some game run in ring 0 TBH.

anon7000• 16 days ago

I think that’s a choice people can make for themselves. Thing is, cheating is an existential threat to the entire business model. Games like Valorant rely on a player base that keeps coming back, and a competitive scene where if you work hard, you can move up the ranks and maybe even make money one day. Players quit over cheating. You log in, you play hard and good, but you just can’t win because there are cheaters. These are games you’re trying to be good at… It’s incredibly demoralizing. Happens enough times, and you’ll find a different game not plagued by the same issue. And then your game is dead. You make money off it being a live service, and so maybe your business is dead too.

So it makes a lot of sense for a company releasing a new FPS game centered around competitive gaming to pull out all the stops to prevent that issue.

Now, the bigger question here is why can I play a game like Overwatch 2 on Linux, but not Valorant? Does Overwatch have a bigger cheating problem? If not, then Valorant should take a look at why their anticheat is just as effective without requiring kernel access.

_aavaa_2• 15 days ago

Nobody is forcing you to play a game with kernel anti-cheat.

I want to play the game, not deal with mass cheating. Unless the people against kernel-level anti cheat can provide an alternative with similar level of protection, there isn’t anything to discuss as far as I’m concerned.

jnwatson• 14 days ago

You're not forced to buy the games that require it.

ChocolateGod4• 16 days ago

Riot went as far as pushing a UEFI firmware update to Valorant players to close a hardware attack — the first time an anti-cheat has reached below the operating system to change your firmware

I don't believe Vanguard did this at all? It told users they need to update their firmware to play, it didn't touch the firmware itself.

Cheats started in user space, so anti-cheat moved into the kernel to see them. Cheats followed into the kernel, and then below it into hypervisors

I think cheats moved into kernel space before anti-cheats did.

sitzkrieg• 16 days ago

long beforehand naturally. the arms race is as good of an excuse as any to trample user rights though

glitchc3• 16 days ago

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.

gopher_space• 16 days ago

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

ButlerianJihad• 16 days ago

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.

charcircuit4• 16 days ago

Windows has no security between processes reading and writing each other's memory as long as they are from the same user. You doing need kernel level access to do it.

jjmarr2• 16 days ago

An arms race is the inevitable outcome. It's either that or competitive gaming is not viable.

I'd rather just give my passport and do one of those face turning challenges to play competitive video games. Then if I get caught cheating, my real life identity can't play anymore, rather than make a new account and "get better at cheating".

If I am a habitual cheater in literally any other sport on Earth, governing body figures that out and issues me a lifetime ban. At that point, I'm blacklisted. Even my Tuesday night dodgeball league can issue bans that actually stick because they know my real identity.

vel0city4• 16 days ago

I want to preface this with the fact that I’m not a gamer.

So you're prefacing it as someone who has never really dealt with the games you like to play getting totally infested with and nearly unplayable with so many cheaters in practically every lobby.

Its easy to think its something that's not needed if one never spends any time in the space.

Do they stop all cheats? No. Do they make the bar extensively higher to cheat? Absolutely. Even they point this out: "A DMA cheat is a separate FPGA card that sits in a PCIe slot and reads the game’s memory directly over the bus, while a second computer processes what it sees and feeds back aim and wallhacks..." Any random person can go run some executable they found on a forum, what percentage of the playerbase has these FPGA cards and a second computer to properly run these cheats? And even then, more modern systems can even detect these kinds of things.

Are there lots of problems with these anti-cheat platforms? Sure. Are they now often developed with ties to countries many wouldn't want have that deep of access to their computers? Sure. Is kernel-level anti-cheat overall as a concept overreach? Probably not for what a lot of players actively want. Players want systems to ensure everyone is playing on a somewhat equal playing field. Other than the games being rendered in the cloud I don't know any other real way to begin to enforce it.

I would rather share a match with the occasional cheater

What if it wasn't "the occasional cheater" and instead was "nearly every match of every game you like to play"?

pibaker2• 16 days ago

Yes, it is very rich for someone with no skin in the literal game to police what others do to their computers.

I don't play any games that use anticheat. But I also don't go out of my way to tell other players who knowingly, consensually installs games with anticheat so they can play them. It's like saying it is an invasion of privacy for cycling athletes to be subjected to doping tests. It's their game. Why does it bother you?

frollogaston5• 16 days ago

It's everyone's problem if those PCs get turned into a botnet, but otherwise whatever.

AgentMasterRace• 16 days ago

what a goof. yes it's a privacy risk, but so is half the things people do on the internet.

cs2 is infested with hackers, arc raiders died because of hackers... many games I've played and loved are dead because of hackers.

vips7L• 16 days ago

Hackers were only one of the many straws that killed Arc Raiders. Mostly it was a dev team that didn’t care.

HDBaseT2• 15 days ago

"CS2 is infested with hackers" is either cope OR you have low trust factor.

literallyroy2• 15 days ago

My NA experience was bad at top level premier (or was ~1 year ago).

Why assume a large swath of the community is coping or low trust factor and that instead your experience is the only accurate one?

Thaxll2• 16 days ago

Since you're not a gamer sorry but your opinion does not means much, you don't seem to realize how cheating is a problem in online games, it's not just an inconvenience, it kills games.

cowthulhu2• 16 days ago

This article reminds me of Chesterton Fence - the author is complaining about something, without ever experiencing why it exists.

ronsor• 16 days ago

Unlike the Fence, kernel anti-cheat wasn't always there and won't be effective in the future with new AI-powered cheats growing.

fastball• 16 days ago

The analogy of Chesterton's Fence does not imply / require that the fence has been "always there".

ramon156• 16 days ago

Cheaters are a problem, that's the focus you should be taking, not that KAC is an overreach. Everyone knows its not a solution.

Writing an article about a problem without addressing the problem shows the author never had the problem i. The first place

CursedSilicon• 16 days ago

I must admit I immediately questioned the credibility of the article when the author admitted they "aren't a gamer" and then started making allusions to vague political threads. Not to say these criticisms aren't valid, but they're a weird jumping off point

The reality is none of the companies want to do these things. Every step in this process locks out some subset of customers. And that's not including the ones who meet the technical requirements but are turned off enough by the decision to just avoid the games anyway

They're an unfortunate response to how utterly profitable and expansive cheating in online games has become. They cost the companies precious development time that could be spent making the game better to instead make it just vaguely "playable" for normal people

orbital-decay2• 15 days ago

The reality is none of the companies want to do these things. (...) They're an unfortunate response to (...)

This reasoning can be used to justify pretty arbitrary behavior, don't you think? Intent is irrelevant for malice, incentives are enough.

orbital-decay2• 15 days ago

I used to host pretty popular servers for several games (mostly the PvP survival kind), built a community around them, and developed custom admin software. It's hard to say I haven't experienced this first-hand, I fully understand the reasons for this to exist. Yet I 100% agree with the author, this went way too far long ago. This will NOT stop until the personal computers are forcibly locked into a fully attested hardware chain, for everyone not just gamers. The control over your personal computer will be eventually taken from you even if you never played a game in your entire life. And then cheats will simply move outside the machine entirely. No entertainment is worth it.

Starting from a certain point, the solution for cheating is better game design, more human involvement, and community building, not adding more restraints which will be circumvented in any case.

grg0• 16 days ago

The tl;dr from the post is that kernel anti-cheat presents both an attack vector for malware and a backdoor for firms. The former is already known to be exploited.

I don't know why comments here are so negative. PC gamers should be wary of installing this stuff, and PC users in general wary of attempts to lock down their computer. If game companies want a fully locked down PC, they already have one; it's called a console.

frollogaston5• 16 days ago

There are people who treat their PC almost like a console, cause all they use it for is video games anyway, but they want more than what a console offers (and will spend a lot). They install whatever. Kernel anti-cheat isn't even the worst thing on those, that'd be Windows.

It's fine. Personally I keep my Mac clean. It can play a few games, which is enough for me. I also found a spare PC in e-waste, and occasionally boot it up to play games in Win10, but wouldn't care if it died.

AuthAuth2• 16 days ago

it hasn’t stopped cheating

No but it has largely reduced it to where you can play competitively and not run into cheaters. Go play f2p csgo and enjoy a hacker in nearly every single game blatantly spinning in spawn head shotting everyone.

dannersy2• 16 days ago

It doesn't take kernel level anticheat to detect that kind of behavior. This is just laziness.

laughing_man5• 16 days ago

It's hard to know. If I were cheating on a competitive server, I'd be using cheats that gave me an edge without making me dominant. That sort of thing is very difficult to detect.

AuthAuth2• 15 days ago

But because you were cheating you'd be above your level. So there would be a mismatch somewhere. You'd need to vastly improve your aim to compensate for bad game sense or use wall hacks to compensate for bad map awareness. Either way its not to hard for people to notice if they watch a replay. Not many cheaters are doing tiny adjustments because that would suggest they're already at that skill level.

sgjohnson2• 16 days ago

I’m actually surprised how a lot of commenters here are defending kernel-level anticheat.

sushid• 16 days ago

Have you played games with a ton of cheaters? It's infuriating, and I'm glad that kernel-level anti-cheat makes it such that you can have an enjoyable gaming experience. Now, I no longer play competitive shooters due to my age, but this was a huge issue back in the day.

Akronymus• 16 days ago

On private/community hosted/moderated servers my experience was that cheating was mostly a non-issue. Only with the advent of forced matchmaking/only official servers and such has it become a real problem.

sgjohnson2• 15 days ago

Yes. I'm an avid Dota 2 player. I used to play the remastered CoD MWs too, and had a Counter-Strike phase as well.

Cheaters using external tools in Dota are rare. Smurfs are a much bigger problem than scripters/maphackers.

In my experience, MW and CS aren't that bad. I see a cheater only about once in 20 games.

I also play online chess. No kernel level anticheat is going to help you there.

goolz• 15 days ago

I would much rather the games have cheaters than give someone like Riot access to Ring 0.

HDBaseT2• 15 days ago

Yes, but the problem is highly exaggerated and Counter Strike has multiple mechanisms for isolating or preventing cheaters, even outside of "traditional" anti-cheat tooling.

I play at moderately high elo in Counter Strike (Faceit Level 10, 25k Premier) in a lesser populated region and even Valve matchmaking is mostly fine. I have a multi-thousand dollar inventory, old Steam account and over 7,000 hours in Counter Strike, all of these things (likely) impact my trust factor.

Trust Factor doesn't detect cheaters, but it sure does expose me to way way less cheaters. It's pretty uncommon to see an obvious cheater in CS2, the number of closet cheaters likely increased. In CS:GO rage cheaters were more common, but they are (for the most part) detected a little bit better now.

throwing_away• 16 days ago

Same. I write cheats for CS2 for my own amusement and it's 100% detectable by replay analysis.

If I'm reacting to information that I shouldn't have at a rate much much greater than the general population, then I'm not psychic, I'm just cheating.

This is also true for aiming, spray control, etc. All current cs2 cheaters are producing a very large and detectable audit trail of very suspicious plays in game, even if they think they're being sneaky. The resolution of the data looks like keeping track of your location and where you're aiming about every 15ms.

Here's some recent research that's related: https://arxiv.org/html/2508.06348v1

I can hide from a kernel module, but I can't hide from my own data trail.

There's only really two paths:

* We do kernel anti-cheat in trusted execution environments, which is bad for all the reasons in the article. When I break through this, you'll get the full "having a cheater" experience in your game.

* We do AI/ML heuristic-based detection to the point where cheaters are forced to behave exactly like non-cheating teammates or risk detection, cheating maybe only 10-20% above their previously established skill patterns. When I break through this, you'll have a normal game and I'll be kind of bored and nobody will be having the "cheaters in my game" experience even though I'm actually cheating.

In either case, I'm still going to try and beat the system for fun. Because video games.

Hikikomori9• 16 days ago

Valve has already discussed using ai? There's also some commercial alternatives. I haven't seen that it works well yet, so it doesn't seem easy to solve.

But it seems that will just push cheat devs to adjust their aimbot to become more human in behavior? For the average gamer the top 0.1% will look like cheaters anyway.

myrmidon2• 15 days ago

Heuristic detection is iffy IMO, because while this might look trivial now (=> before cheaters optimize for it) false positives could easily ruin the user experience after a few rounds of cat & mouse: Even if you manage to keep sensitivity high (detecting >90% of cheaters), if you have like single digit percentages of cheaters and false positives, a lot of your bans are innocent.

If you keep the heuristics "tolerant", on the other had, you end up perpetually chasing in a cat-and-mouse game, and a lot of cheaters go undetected inbetween detection upgrades.

I feel heuristic detection is a "metagame" that developers don't really want to engage in, because you basically can't really win and it's perpetual work/spending.

Hikikomori9• 16 days ago

Most of the worries that people focus on already apply to programs running in userspace.

charcircuit4• 16 days ago

The overreach of kernel anticheats that this article complains about can be done just as easily from user mode anticheats. It's not whether an anticheat is kernel mode or not for whether it is overreaching or not.

The hardware requirements lock out Linux and the Steam Deck

Because their security is out of date. Meanwhile macOS has modern security good enough to not even require Vanguard to need kernel mode to be effective.

giov43• 16 days ago

Uninstalled riot years ago, not playing games that dont run on linux with proton, problem solved and you should do the same.

Avoiding to play games that take over my system on a low-level is a no go, I can live without LoL or BF6 and I live even better :)

ignoring this problems means you don't care about your identity, data, privacy and you prefer to keep ignoring this and play the games that hype abd you like, but inside you know that long term your are profiled and such profiling will be used against you!

Parae• 15 days ago

I play fighting games. Didn't even bother to try 2XKO on Windows because I knew I won't be able to play on Linux due to Vanguard.

bob1029• 16 days ago

I don't think kernel goes far enough. We are pushing down the wrong path. We don't need kernel level anti cheats.

I think there should be real world legal consequences for exploiting information systems like this. "Gaming" shouldn't magically exempt a business sector from reasonable protection against fraud and abuse. Just because it's easy to do or involves bits in a computer (that isn't physically on the game developer's premises) should not magically exempt bad actors from prosecution. Yes, it's your computer, those are technically your bits, but this is about how these things are used and the context within which they are.

We have the CFAA in the US, but you'd need a fairly loose interpretation to cover most forms of cheating today. I don't really see the distinction between client and server when the actions taken on the client side cause a dramatic loss in quality of service for other clients connected to that same server or p2p relay.

South Korea has laws on the books as of 2016.

https://dotesports.com/overwatch/news/ow-hacker-sentenced-pr...

giov43• 16 days ago

yes but you are going off topic, the point is companies installing low level malware on any gamer's system to prevent cheaters and monitoring all of them as a consequence. And not that there are not enough laws against cheaters and against people tampering with a software or system, also tampering imho has always been the base for the rest of the reversing :)

dTal• 16 days ago

No thanks.

We don't need kernel level anti cheats.

More than that, they'd be illegal by your own standard, if applied fairly. You can't steal control of someone's computer just because they bought a game from you. That's a strictly more severe "exploit" with strictly more impact on "quality of service" than sending bogus data to a server. Cuts both ways.

But we all know how it'd really play out. If lying to a server counts as "hacking", but corporate rootkits and locked bootloaders are fine, all you've really done is solidify "felony infringement of business model". You haven't protected anyone. Video games are a stupid thing to immolate computing freedom for.

wronex• 16 days ago

I play a lot. Competitive shooters mostly. Most of them are unplayable for one or two reasons. Cross play (controllers with aim assist) and cheaters. As a PC player I would like to see no aim assist and actual consequences for cheating. I’ll gladly verify my real world identity, if it meant cheaters where banned once and forever. I’ve heard this is how it works in Korea (claim not verified) and could see it work here too as most of Europe has access to very UX friendly state sponsored digital ID.

If there were actual stakes to cheating, it would be less prevalent. Now you can create another account and keep playing. Often for free!

On a side note. How come replay analysis doesn’t catch more cheaters?

iscoelho8• 16 days ago

"How come replay analysis doesn’t catch more cheaters?"

1) There's too many players.

2) Closet cheaters are extremely subjective: automated & manual moderation would be full of false positives. In these cases, functional anti-cheats actually serve to vindicate these players.

galkk• 16 days ago

So I would rather share a match with the occasional cheater than run un-auditable ring-0 software on the same machine I use for anything private.

You’re not a gamer so you don’t have a word here. I was a competitive gamer and I would happily accept even the game where you need a government id to be allowed to play in ranked/matchmaking. I do dual boot for gaming/home stuff though.

nubinetwork• 16 days ago

During setup, I did a clean Windows 11 install
Unfortunately the install was legacy MBR
I was forced to convert the disk with mbr2gpt and spent about an hour manually rebuilding the boot drive to work under UEFI.

I'm surprised Windows 11 even booted on MBR, I was under the impression that after 7 all Windows installs had to be GPT/EFI, regardless of whether secure boot was on or not.

iscoelho8• 16 days ago

In my opinion, the debate about kernel anti-cheat on Windows is disingenuous fear-mongering. I'm confused why Hacker News of all places misrepresents the technical details.

You can already completely compromise the average user's privacy with an underprivileged process (nearly all of your personal information is accessible with zero privileges!), and you can already persist with administrator privileges (that is routinely given on Windows).

In regard to the "RCE attacker risk", attackers can RCE to escalate just as easily into vulnerable Windows services (there's too many to count). Kernel drivers aren't that special.

In regard to the "CrowdStrike risk", that's not privacy related and is extremely overblown.

What exactly does a kernel driver change regarding privacy? Nothing I can think of.

It's this simple: If games want your personal data, they don't need a kernel driver to get it.

ChocolateGod4• 16 days ago

In my opinion, the debate about kernel anti-cheat on Windows is fear-mongering

I don't think a lot of people who complain about kernel anti-cheat actually play competitive games.

iscoelho8• 16 days ago

I feel someone doesn't need to play competitive games to be able to give an honest assessment of the privacy & security risks.

I'm sad I'm not seeing that honesty elsewhere in this thread.

Hikikomori9• 15 days ago

You can already completely compromise the average user's privacy with an underprivileged process (nearly all of your personal information is accessible with zero privileges!), and you can already persist with administrator privileges (that is routinely given on Windows).

Most complaints about kernel level are indeed about privacy, and as you say a user space process can already do so much that this argument is moot. Most people are not aware or ignore it to fear monger because anything kernel sounds really bad.

n3rv• 16 days ago

Letting RIOT into your ring ZERO is not a risk I'm willing to take.

It just sits nagging in the back of your mind. So why take the risk.

Hikikomori9• 16 days ago

Are you playing games on a different user? If not a user space program can already access all your files and memory of running processes.

giov43• 15 days ago

yama? ptrace scope? namespaces? selinux? apparmor?

of course depends also on system defaults, but then why I cannot dump ssh-agent process from same user?

oh maybe that's also the reason why the move to the kernel level in general? or that's not necessary with different privileges and they could stay on user space without taking over kernel? (insert here philosoraptor meme pls)

again having low leve drivers from external corps that could ready anything anytime from my system and exfiltrate without me even knowing is even more scary than running a recent microsoft os! and should be avoided if possible!

frollogaston5• 15 days ago

Userspace program at least needs admin privs to read others' memory, right?

km144• 15 days ago

So I would rather share a match with the occasional cheater than run un-auditable ring-0 software on the same machine I use for anything private.

The article makes an argument that anti-cheat is not worth the trade-off, yet the author admits they are a non-gamer. Then they go on to present one example of anti-cheat that tells us all we need to know about actual gamers' preferences—FACEIT. For those who don't know, FACEIT is a third-party matchmaking service, primarily for CS2. People choose to go through the hoops of using third-party service that installs kernel-level anti-cheat on their computer because it helps to keep cheaters out of their games. This seems like pretty strong evidence that the author's argument is not a good representation of gamers' thoughts on this. I don't know what the actual solution is. I suspect if Valve made their own kernel-level anti-cheat people might trust it more, but it's still the same problem.

nomel• 15 days ago

I suspect the only technical alternative would be the extreme of "this is not your system at all" mode, and necessarily involve dedicated hardware, where you can boot your computer as a "game console". I also suspect this would mean that mode would necessarily be the "primary" mode [1], PS2 style.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_for_PlayStation_2

avadodin• 15 days ago

Faceit has cheaters too by all accounts and some of the cheats have advanced to the point that not even kernel access under secure boot helps as they don't even run on the same device.

Behavioral patterns are a much better target.

If your cheats make you play like a legit player, who cares? It's the same as in the gym. People are bothered by people who look like Ahnold, and still can't lift one plate. Not the fattie who takes t to look like a normal person.

I think that's the spirit of VAC.

The only issue is it can't —or won't— detect people helicopter–hopping no–scope sniping around the map or terrible players who shoot you in the face every time in 12ms.

literallyroy2• 15 days ago

Saying FACEIT has cheaters “by all accounts” feels like a bad faith argument without including that it has significantly fewer cheaters (at least at higher ranks). As well as having the ability to report to real human moderators.

I have too many hours in cs:go and cs2 and am level 10 FACEIT. I have had many awful cheater experiences in the native competitive systems but have never had an obvious cheater (never reported someone) in a FACEIT match.

It works. It raises the bar high enough that cheating is significantly less frequent.

____mr____• 14 days ago

If your cheats make you play like a legit player, who cares?

Many people

ultimafan• 14 days ago

Except cheating in games isn't the equivalent of steroids in the gym, since they let cheaters do things that literally no one can without them. And steroids at least have the argument behind them that you still have to put the work in (it's not "free" gains like cheats are, that guy that looks like Arnold is still putting hours into the gym every week to look like that, you can't just take steroids and look the same if you aren't willing to put in the effort)

A much better analogy would be showing up to a weightlifting competition with a construction crane and thinking competing with it against human lifters is fair.

lenkite• 15 days ago

The only acceptable and correct trade-off for anti-cheat is fully remote gaming + locked-down console, where the Game companies own the software and servers and hardware and just rent you a "play slice" via their locked-down console. I suspect even then, they will want to install tools to monitor you to satisfy their "analytics"

josefritzishere• 15 days ago

That sounds like malware.

nhggfu• 15 days ago

online real-money and crypto poker sites have a big cheating problem too - and face similar issues for detection.

Alarmingly the software for one popular operator has some very invasive features - verging on spyware - including harvesting screenshots of all screens (sent to some unknown biz in india, stored under "who-knows-what" security), hardware fingerprinting, and 'remote access' wired in for future releases.

https://pokerindustrynews.com/features/coinpoker-anti-cheat-...

SwellJoe• 15 days ago

I have purchased every Civilization (and closely related) game since III. I have played more hours of any single Civ than all other games combined.

I didn't buy Civ VII, because I don't buy malware. As long as it's got Denuvo, it's not a game I'm buying or playing.

preisschild• 15 days ago

Fuck Denuvo's parent company (Irdeto) too. They have been making DRM cards for austrian state TV for decades and thus making it a PITA to do something like broadcasting your TV signal over IP to the TVs in the house...

SomeHacker44• 14 days ago

Is there some reliable tool which can list all the kernel anti cheat that may be installed on my Windows system, and the games I need to uninstall to remove them? Or remove them directly? Thanks!

Kernel anti-cheat is an overreach

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