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My brother claims that Vanguard for League can do the same to gaming PCs that install it as CrowdStrike did to businesses who installed that, is this true? Does Vanguard have as much access/power?
Yes, and I’ve seen it happening. Usually it doesn’t instantly brick every PC, but it can sometimes brick certain PCs with specific configurations. Then it will be silently patched without acknowledgement for the bug.
I’ve seen it mess with (and crash) graphics and network drivers, rendering PCs useless until forced reboot. It can also mess up other games, processes, and even updates.
People have been warning gamers about kernel level anticheats since they were introduced, because no userland code should run with that level of privileges, period. However, people still installed those games not really understanding the threat, and that’s why we have so many games with a kernel anticheat.
Helldivers 2 fucked my PC up after one of their updates in May. Game literally became unplayable and corrupted my Steam database twice (causing me to have to reinstall Steam both times).
In PVP games, I can sort of understand the players’ desire to have a cheat free experience, but in purely PvE coop games, it really feels so pointless and is such overkill. Regardless, there are better ways to accomplish anticheat that don’t involve gaining kernel level access. The risk isn’t worth it.
That unfortunately means, you can’t play a lot of games. And for most people it’s practically unknowable what the installer is doing, they don’t expect a game to nuke their computer.
There needs to be accountability and a certain level of trust. Microsoft shouldn’t allow kernel drivers for crap like anti cheat.
Yes, the key difference being that nobody’s playing Valorant on airport displays. Just yesterday I installed a new early access game for two accounts at home and discovered that it just wouldn’t work with the non-admin account because of anti-cheat. All of this is making me consider going back to running games under flatpak.
Helldivers 2 does the same thing. If this continues it will be extremely advisable to move any non-gaming use-cases to a different computer as you have no idea what the “anti-cheat” is doing with that level of authority over your computer.
That works until all* games come with root level anti cheat. It was the same with micro transactions which people still defend despite being utter shit.
Realistically this will never be 100% but it will be enough of the mass market AAA games like CoD etc to mean that if you functionally want to play a game made in the last X number of years you will need to accept this or stop playing games altogether. I think most people will continue to play games. Most people will continue to install root level anti cheat, knowingly or otherwise, and all of them will get fucked by an exploit of that software. They may never even know about it.
It’s also potentially a infiltration vector for malicious activity.
Genshin impacts anti-cheat has been used to enable ransomware taking over windows computers, and you don’t even need to have Genshin installed.
It was a danger to all windows users just by existing, because the ransomware just came with the genshin anti-cheat, which it would install on its own. Because it was a “verified” piece of software windows would just go “oh ok seems cool, go right ahead” and the ransomware would gain complete control of the system through the anti-cheat.
In theory, yes. Vanguard uses ring 0 access; and Failures/crashes on the code that are running on that level will lead to BSOD.
In practice, Riot very likely tests Vanguard on various hardware as parts of their tests before shipping updates on it, as it’s used by all players that play Lol and Valorant; and a fuckup like that would mess the trust they’ve built between the players. Players are trusting them to run ring 0 code on their computer, so they can have a cheatless experience after all.
In practice, CrowdStrike very likely tests Falcon on various hardware as parts of their tests before shipping updates on it, as it’s used by a huge amount of enterprises; and a fuckup like that would mess the trust they’ve built with those enterprises. Enterprises are trusting them to run ring 0 code on their computer, so they can have a malware-less experience after all.
Theoretically it should only be running during gameplay, and that’s probably true as I’m sure security researchers would’ve pointed it out if games installed a persistently running rootkit. So it’s different than Crowdstrike which was running immediately from boot.
So there is that, if it caused your PC to crash it should be fine after reboot. The driver has God power though as far as your PC goes so if it was the point of entry for a malicious attack you could be really screwed.