Hacking into Kernel Anti-Cheats: How cheaters bypass Faceit, ESEA and Vanguard anti-cheats

Yesterday: we need kernel level anti-cheat to stop cheaters! Privacy be damned.

Today: here's how cheaters bypass anti cheat in the kernel.

Who could have possibly seen that coming? It's almost like anything other than server side anticheat is conceptually broken! (See the monitors with ML map assist and the past 20 years of client exploits). And that's ignoring the currently strong financial incentives of breaking these things...

It's a good thing League of Legends is adding Vanguard so it can't be run on Linux anymore.

Yeah it's actually to stop people's addiction to a shit game
- This. I'm lowkey glad I'll never get to play it again

some lemming was actually arguing with me the other day about how kernel anticheat is needed and impossible to beat.

Yes. Program REAL anti-cheat, which is done ON THE FUCKING SERVER. If the player shoots as if they know where the enemy is behind the wall, then BAN them.

Shooting people through walls/smoke is a perfectly normal gameplay pattern in tactical shooters so it isn't that simple
- What I meant is if you can ALWAYS tell where the enemy is behind a wall (to start shooting in that direction), and you're sniping (footsteps are too far to be heard), there's some fishy business going on.
If the game is designed so bullets can go through walls then one would expect situations where the player can intuit the location of the enemy.

Imagine a tall wall which blocks all vision of anyone standing behind it. Imagine most of of the wall is knocked down flat but some remains standing just enough to hide 1 standing player. Suppose you see a player walk behind that wall and not come out the other side. It's reasonably to deduce you can shoot that wall to damage that player.

Suppose the surroundings are quiet and you can hear footsteps of enemies you can't see in a building. In knowing the area you can deduce where the enemies are depending on sound of footsteps on glass or on wood. Most games probably have directional sound which helps too.
~That helps a bit, but if you watch the video, you can see that the cheats have become so sophisticated that even a server wouldn't be able to track them. Stuff like offloading display output to a 2nd computer, identifying enemy players and spoofing a mouse's inputs via a microcontroller to move your mouse to the enemy as if it were a "real" player.

Anti-cheat in general is simply unable to monitor systems at that level of physical complexity, server or client.

I prefer anti cheat by design, its probably easier said than done though and impossible for precision shooters like CS. But things like making team work more important than wall hacks and making your approach and strategy more important than how good you are at aiming

Exactly what I thought. The competitive, individualistic nature of modern competitive shooters makes cheating far too profitable. Not just in a micro sense (winning a game) but also in a macro sense as these games offer prizes, lootboxes, social fame from winning consistently.

Listened to this while i was working, it was more about ways of cheating than software tech that helps cheating. But regardless an interresting bit. Shows that if somebody will cheat they will cheat and its done more often than you think

Its time to install cameras in gamers' house. That would fix the issue for good. 🤔😏

Fascinating video!

IMO, the issue is social, rather than a technical one. Competitive games, especially ones that can make people a lot of money through cosmetics, prizes, even just social capital ("high skill" players are the ones that dominate streaming platforms, after all) all provide a real, tangible benefit to the cost of cheating.

Consider the games where legitimate players suffer the most impact from cheating: MOBAs and competitive FPS. Consider games that have limited to no cheating problems: Indie games, single player experiences (duh), cooperative games.

One reason I've put 100s of hours into Deep Rock Galactic (ROCK AND STONE!) is because I can get the same multiplayer experience but without the stress or suspicion of competing with others. This might be obvious, but if you think about it the draw of many of these competitive games isn't just the competitive aspect, but the cooperative aspect.

You could easily play 1v1 on many of these games (Rocket League, CSGO, Valorant all have popular 1v1 modes) but the largest playerbases always exist on the team side of these games: There's a real draw to working cooperatively towards a common goal.

PvE and Co-op is a massively underlooked gaming paradigm that is thankfully coming into its own after the last few years. DRG, It Takes Two, CoD Zombies, Minecraft, Overcooked etc. all have incredibly dedicated communities and I don't think that's a coincidence.

Couch/online Co-op totally counter the problems faced by competitive, player-vs-player toxicity and cheating. I know it sounds like a reach, but does it surprise you that gaming genres that emulate capitalism (competition and individualistic profit-seeking) are facing many of the same problems of capitalism (cheating against "legitimate" participants, toxic cultures of "the grind" and many others). Maybe competition, at least in a direct sense, can be a curse to your game from the beginning?