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Riot Games Now Requires Kernel-Level Anti-Cheat Software for League of Legends, Following Valorant's Implementation

Vanguard, the controversial anti-cheat software initially attached to Valorant, is now also coming to League of Legends.

Summary:

The article discusses Riot Games’ requirement for players to install their Vanguard anti-cheat software, which runs at the kernel level, in order to play their games such as League of Legends and Valorant. The software aims to combat cheating by scanning for known vulnerabilities and blocking them, as well as monitoring for suspicious activity while the game is being played. However, the use of kernel-level software raises concerns about privacy and security, as it grants the company complete access to users’ devices.

The article highlights that Riot Games is owned by Tencent, a Chinese tech giant that has been involved in censorship and surveillance activities in China. This raises concerns that Vanguard could potentially be used for similar purposes, such as monitoring players’ activity and restricting free speech in-game.

Ultimately, the decision to install Vanguard rests with players, but the article urges caution and encourages players to consider the potential risks and implications before doing so.

Gormadt ,
@Gormadt@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Kernal level anti-cheat means I ain’t gonna play it

I don’t care where the company is based no game should be requiring kernal level access, that’s just opening the door for security concerns

treadful ,
@treadful@lemmy.zip avatar

I’m wondering if there’s a way we can even know they’re installing it. Windows just gives that generic admin prompt, I imagine? Tells you nothing of what’s happening.

RustyNova ,

Well if you get asked for sudo, then that’s a risk.

davidgro , (edited )

Installing almost anything* on Windows requires the equivalent of sudo, same as Linux.

Determining if it’s a normal install or adding a kernel driver wouldn’t be feasible just by watching the installation. (On either OS if they are not showing terminal output)

EDIT:

My context here (which I should have been explicit about sooner) is: “ordinary user is installing a closed source commercial large game” (with its own installer) and doesn’t know if they are also getting a free rootkit.

They are going to just click Next without changing defaults, and are not going to extract and inspect anything.

corsicanguppy ,

Installing almost anything* on Windows requires the equivalent of sudo, same as Linux.

I feel like you’re not sure how system software like ssh and a user’s personal game software can install differently in different places, and where one needs no root access to install at all. Go see how mac does it.

maccentric ,

Macs still ask me for permissions and I have no idea what’s asking to do what.

davidgro ,

I get it for Linux and Windows (though I don’t know how MacOS does it) my context here (which I should have been more explicit about) is “ordinary user is installing a closed source commercial large game” (with its own installer) and doesn’t know if they are also getting a free rootkit.

Sure when it’s something you compile yourself and you have some knowledge you can ./configure it to go under your home directory and not need sudo to make install later, but a game with a script or binary you need to run is likely to ask for root on launch (Especially on Windows) and maybe asks later or has command line options for a single user install, but we can assume the user does whatever is default.

bdonvr ,

Most user software should NOT need sudo.

Typically you need “sudo” to use the package installer though, if that’s where you’re getting confused. But that’s because most Linux package managers are built to install software to be available for all users. However once installed that does NOT mean the package always has sudo access. And the way Linux software is typically installed is just putting the executable in a certain folder, unlike Windows where you run a software’s custom installer which asks for admin access and then does who knows what.

NightAuthor ,

You usually have the option of installing for just your user, and I think that usually doesn’t require admin permissions.

davidgro ,

My context here (which I should have been more explicit about) is “ordinary user is installing a closed source commercial large game” (with its own installer) and doesn’t know if they are also getting a free rootkit.

Sure when it’s something you compile yourself and you have some knowledge you can ./configure it to go under your home directory and not need sudo to make install later, but a game with a script or binary you need to run is likely to ask for root on launch (Especially on Windows) and maybe asks later or has command line options for a single user install, but we can assume the user does whatever is default.

However once installed that does NOT mean the package always has sudo access.

I didn’t suggest that it would (although it Could if it’s malicious - on Linux that would be as simple as the setuid bit. Or …back on topic… installing a kernel driver on either OS)

Draconic_NEO ,
@Draconic_NEO@lemmy.world avatar

same as Linux.

You couldn’t be more wrong bud. Flatpaks do not require sudo, executables run from a directory (like how Steam games are run) don’t require sudo either. You only need sudo if installing from the main package manager like deb, rpm, pacman or whatever your distro uses. Most games on Linux aren’t installed from the main package manager though.

(On either OS if they are not showing terminal output)

If it’s a package for the package manager you could download the archive for it and pull it apart to see its contents, it’s usually very clear when such software includes kernel drivers or kernel patchers. Most software on Linux uses the package manager to install or a script to unpack, both of which are relatively easy to explore even if the software isn’t open source, haven’t found too many linux apps with Binary installers, they might exist but if they do they aren’t popular or common.

davidgro ,

Since this keeps coming up, I edited the post you replied to. TLDR is that we are assuming different contexts.

markr ,

You can list all the current loaded drivers. You can examine the system event log for service start operations. You can run with a kernel debugger attached and examine any loaded driver. The driver itself is likely correctly signed and will not require additional user acknowledgement beyond what was given when the game was installed.

xthexder ,
@xthexder@l.sw0.com avatar

Unfortunately all of those just tell you it’s already installed, not that it’s about to install it. If you didn’t know, who’s going to be constantly checking for new drivers after every software install?

MonkderZweite , (edited )

It would probably show up in Autoruns. Maybe even with a background service in task manager.

treadful ,
@treadful@lemmy.zip avatar

Kernel level drivers would not be in auto run.

MonkderZweite ,

What, why not?

treadful ,
@treadful@lemmy.zip avatar

Ask Microsoft

admin ,
@admin@lemmy.my-box.dev avatar

*kernel

Bazoogle ,

Colonel*

harry_balzac ,

Carnal

trashgirlfriend ,

Kerbal

maccentric ,

Cornhole

locuester ,

Cornell

admin ,
@admin@lemmy.my-box.dev avatar

Cornholio

pirat ,

Chernobyl

tabular ,
@tabular@lemmy.world avatar

That’s O’Neill, with two 'L’s

Lev_Astov ,
@Lev_Astov@lemmy.world avatar

Good cheat prevention needs to be part of the game’s fundamental design, not some virus as a band-aid.

yamanii ,
@yamanii@lemmy.world avatar

Can you name one of those games that have no anticheat and also no cheaters?

Lev_Astov ,
@Lev_Astov@lemmy.world avatar

Anti cheat as a fundamental design does not necessarily mean no anti cheat.

fatalError ,

While I do agree with you, some cheats manipulate the memory itself so you would need some elevated privilages to dectect them as the cheats themsevles run with these privileges

uriel238 ,
@uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Yep, a lot of recent anti-cheat is looking a lot like DRM.

harry315 ,

more like intentionally installed malware but yes, 100 % this

Grangle1 ,

Not just looking like DRM, I would say it IS DRM.

dunestorm ,
@dunestorm@lemmy.world avatar

Not just DRM, a rootkit which is much worse.

CosmicCleric , (edited )
@CosmicCleric@lemmy.world avatar

As a geopolitical side note to all this, there is a small but real chance that we may be going to war with (Edit: China) someday in the future, over Taiwan.

Do you really want an adversary that can potentionally disable a large portion of your populations computers in one fell swoop?

Edit: Because of Tencent’s ownership of Riot, which is a Chinese company.

Serinus ,

them

Riot? I don’t see a war with Riot being likely.

CosmicCleric ,
@CosmicCleric@lemmy.world avatar

them

Riot? I don’t see a war with Riot being likely.

/picardfacepalm

Buttons ,
@Buttons@programming.dev avatar

If a security researcher finds and reports a vulnerability without permission, you would hope the company with the vulnerability would get in trouble, but instead the researcher gets in trouble and is and hassled by the government and the courts. Our government has already decided to sacrifice national security for the convenience of companies when it comes to security.

le_saucisson_masquay ,

I believe it’s much more than a small chance, war over Taiwan is going to happen. Question is when, not if. nbcnews.com/…/us-air-force-general-predicts-war-c…

But I agree, trading his computer control to China just to be able to play a game is ridiculous. Hopefully those who agree aren’t people that would matter anyway.

Buddahriffic ,

Even if none of those machines matter, a botnet the size of all valorant + LoL players has a lot of ddos potential.

le_saucisson_masquay ,

Yeah you’re right

Dominik , (edited )

deleted_by_author

    •
    CosmicCleric ,
    @CosmicCleric@lemmy.world avatar

    keep in mind Riot is an american company owned by a chinese one so idk if they would actually side with china

    One can only hope. Back doors do exist, and seeing how parts of American politics these days seems to favor certain foreign countries, I’m not so sure. Greed seems to override oaths.

    saintshenanigans ,

    Do you really want an adversary that can potentionally disable a large portion of your populations computers in one fell swoop?

    Just saw a Netflix movie about this a month or so back. Obviously the writing was a little embellished, but it was fucking terrifying to imagine something like that happening on a real scale.

    EmperorHenry ,
    @EmperorHenry@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

    If something won’t run with core isolation enabled, it’s probably malware

    ByteJunk ,
    @ByteJunk@lemmy.world avatar

    The kernel-level cheats would fall into this category I guess, but cheaters will still be running them. Could anything without the same level access identify them?

    EmperorHenry ,
    @EmperorHenry@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

    It doesn’t matter. Nothing should ever need to get that deep into your system…ever.

    You need human moderators watching all the players to see if anyone’s cheating and then you manually ban the cheaters

    Lipriv30 ,

    I wonder what is dead by daylight’s easy anti cheat?

    Defaced ,

    No thanks, I’ll stick to dota 2 and cs2. Everyone else should do the same, this kernel level anti cheat doesn’t even work. Well, no anti cheat is perfect, but vanguard isn’t any better than any other anti cheat. All it’s doing is collecting data about your computer and running at an insanely invasive level.

    halva ,
    @halva@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

    It does though… Vanguard is ambiguous as to how actually secure it is, but it’s damn effective.

    Defaced ,

    It’s not though: youtu.be/RwzIq04vd0M?si=hLI9NQRI18clm5WG

    That video explains how vanguard is bypassed using multiple methods. It really isn’t any better or worse than something like VAC or EAC.

    Virulent ,

    Valorant has cheats, they’re just more expensive. With advances in AI, all anti-cheat will be circumvented via hardware soon so it wont even matter

    havokdj ,

    Data collection is the least of your concern with a kernel level anti cheat

    Lipriv30 ,

    What about dead by daylight’s easy anti cheat?

    levmyskin , (edited )

    I think the main issue here (I haven’t seen it mentioned in the top comments) is that LoL doesn’t even have a cheating problem honestly. I’ve been playing since 2014, off and on, and I think I might have met maybe one scripter (I’m not really sure). Lol has definitely a toxicity problem, but I honestly don’t think it has ever had a scripters/cheaters problem, so I really don’t understand this. Is it because of bot accounts? Whose games are these bots ruining (never seen them between gold-diamond)? Does it justify a kernel level anti cheat? Honestly, the real problem with this is not the kernel level anti cheat (because I guess that might be useful for games like valorant), it’s the fact that this was never really even close to be necessary

    Edit: interestingly enough, riot games itself was reporting in 2020 that cheaters and scripters were ruining a very minor fraction of the games. Ref: leagueoflegends.com/…/dev-anti-cheat-in-lol-more/

    Socsa ,

    I don’t even consider scripting and macros to be cheating tbh.

    derpgon ,

    Auto dodging, perfect skills hots, staying at max range at all times, instant item usages to maximize potential.

    Yeah, nothing illegal officer.

    I so wish you had a game with enemy Zeri using scripts. You’d change your mind very quickly.

    Allero ,

    Kernel level anti-cheat is never justified.

    Other than that, true!

    EssentialCoffee ,

    Scripters and cheating was a pretty common complaint in both r/lol and also on inven and in Chinese forums.

    levmyskin ,

    Bringing some data in, riot games itself was reporting that cheating was not that much of a problem really: leagueoflegends.com/…/dev-anti-cheat-in-lol-more/

    According to the plot we see there, a very very very minor percentage of games was affected by cheaters in 2020, and I honestly doubt the situation has changed. So, until we see new data from riot, I’m calling bullshit on this whole vanguard thing

    tabular , (edited )
    @tabular@lemmy.world avatar

    Is there an open source MOBA? Players need an alternative, even if it’s not as good to begin with.

    ruben ,
    @ruben@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

    I mean Dota exists. I guess I’ll switch to that. Or maybe I’ll just take a shower.

    FunkyMonk ,

    Dota was the OG anyway, LOL coined the term MOBA to shift focus that they stole their gameplay mechanic from one dude, icefrog.

    Salix , (edited )

    I remember when people used to type AoS-like game (Aeon of Strife) when hosting a similar custom map on SC or Warcraft III

    i.e. DotA 5v5 AoS-like

    Then after DotA got popular, it became DotA-like

    i.e. Naruto Wars 5v5 DotA-like

    MonkeMischief ,

    And then that totally banger BassHunter song cemented DOTA into history forever 🎧

    verdigris ,

    Dota has always been a drastically better game, I see this as an absolute win for Linux. League is cancer.

    Mango ,

    Uhhhh no. Dota is slow and terrible. Not that I think anyone should touch that CCP spyware of a game League.

    verdigris ,

    I would argue that the pacing of a Dota match is one of the many things that makes it better than League.

    I find league is insanely repetitive and has very little room for player creativity or expression beyond “I can hit my skill shots”. It’s just rote exercise that you can map out to the minute. Dota gives heroes and players space to breathe and flexibility to play in multiple ways, not to mention having a balance team that actually wants to balance the game, not just sell the latest champions.

    Mango ,

    Whew, I can tell you never got particularly good at league. You’re probably right about macro decisions and definitely right about new champions being OP on release, but matchups and micro interactions are where it’s at!

    That said, I’ll never play again.

    verdigris ,

    Nope, I just realize how much better it can be when the dev team has creativity and respect for players.

    Sanctus ,
    @Sanctus@lemmy.world avatar

    Not that I know of, the most popular open source games I have heard of are Space Station 13 (and its newer release Space Station 14 on steam), and Beyond All Reason which is an RTS.

    Zagorath ,
    @Zagorath@aussie.zone avatar

    If we’re talking about RTSs as well, there’s 0AD, which I tried out briefly during the period between Ensemble Studios being shut down, and the revival of the Age franchise with the HD edition (over a decade ago now, and it looks like 0AD has been under constant development since then).

    loobkoob ,
    @loobkoob@kbin.social avatar

    Is open-source compatible with competitive games? As much as I love open-source in general, I feel like cheating would be a serious problem if the source code is available for everyone. That's not really an issue in single-player or co-operative games (outside of cheating leaderboard positions) but it would absolutely cause problems in a PvP game.

    paraphrand ,

    It’s not so much that the source code is available. It’s that there would not be systems in place to ban cheaters, detect them, etc.

    It’s open source, why would there be support teams and bans and all that?

    tabular , (edited )
    @tabular@lemmy.world avatar

    In the past people created communities for multiplayer games around specific forums or LAN centers and sometimes hosted allow-list servers. If you didn’t play by the rules you’d get banned off the forum, and thus that server which it was tied to.

    I’m not a fan of needing an account to play online and if I created a multiplayer game I don’t want to host that information in a centralized server. Perhaps there are more ways than I know but I’d be more interested in finding an alternative to this arms race of banning vs avoiding bans.

    paraphrand ,

    That’s fair. But I don’t think the MOBA scene as it is would switch to small communities like that .

    Also, for people wanting to cause trouble, bans are meaningless sadly. Unless you also have some rigorous system for sign up. And I guess a small community could have that. But something at scale like a popular game with millions of players can’t.

    And rigorous only goes so far, before it’s impinging on privacy.

    It’s a tough issue to crack. Popularity and a large scale is always the reason foe all the cheaters and trolls to come around.

    tabular ,
    @tabular@lemmy.world avatar

    Do you know if the network delay is tolerable to play with almost anyone, anywhere in the world for casual and competative MOBA games?

    I see no answer to stop trolling but perhaps there is another way worth investigating for cheaters. Some companies treat piracy as people simply wanting the game without paying and would invest in DRM. Some consider it as them providing a worse service than the piracy sites so they should improve the service. Maybe cheaters are unsatified customers?

    Would some cheaters be satified with in-game cheats and not look for more extreme 3rd party cheats? Suppose cheaters were provided servers as a choice (in a friendly way instead of shadow banning) which let them play against willing non-cheaters. This supposes regular players could be encouraged to fight with some level of handicap as a challenge.

    Draconic_NEO ,
    @Draconic_NEO@lemmy.world avatar

    Could allow people to curate their own blacklists if they don’t want to play in groups like that, then they would have the option to play in public and online, it would be more rough and they would have to keep it up but having those tools would allow them to play publicly without needing to join a forum or group while still curating their experience. Obviously would be more work but it would be a good fallback.

    If that’s too hard they’d still have the option of joining one of those groups.

    tabular , (edited )
    @tabular@lemmy.world avatar

    An issue of users having blocklists is that they may use it against people that are merely good at playing the game.

    https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/c4a69a48-0598-4d19-8554-729698b80bfe.jpeg

    I suppose an open source game would have no choice but to have whatever feature users are willingly to addon to their local game.

    Draconic_NEO ,
    @Draconic_NEO@lemmy.world avatar

    I can definately see that being a problem, all systems have their downsides. A system like that though I feel is necessary in a game with decentralized online play.

    For centralized ones it doesn’t make as much sense since those already have anti-cheat (automated or human run) and bans from the service, which aren’t perfect either, innocent people often get banned when they didn’t deserve it, it’s just not as apparent because in those communities anyone banned is witch hunted afterwards, there’s a lot of appeal to authority in those communities.

    All user crowd control systems, even the lack of one is going to have negative effects to their usage, even if they aren’t apparent at first.

    tabular , (edited )
    @tabular@lemmy.world avatar

    Proving source code would reduce the barrier to entry for creating cheats, but cheats are very prevalent anyway. I do not want to make proprietary games so I have no choice but to find an alternative if I ever choose to make a competitive multiplayer game.

    There was a MSI monitor at CES which pops-up a warning when an enemy appears on the mini-map in LoL. Significant cheats may be accessible without going to shading sites (perhaps kernel-level anti-cheat could have some success to figure out what monitor you’re using but my understanding is that’s easily fooled in software and perhaps undetectable via hardware video splinters). Cheats which do not run on the host machine at all are undetectable by traditional anti-cheats.

    I think the end-game of anti-cheat is intolerable. Can one get enough data for machine learning to determining if a player is cheating without a high error rate (banning false positives)? Would players tolerate having cameras recording their inputs like it’s a submitted speedrun or an exam during Covid?

    Euphoma ,

    osu! is a competitive game that is open source, and its arguably the most popular rhythm game right now and there’s not much of a cheating problem.

    loobkoob ,
    @loobkoob@kbin.social avatar

    You're right about osu! Although it's probably one of the few competitive games where there's no gameplay interaction between players - if another player is cheating, it hurts the overall competitiveness, of course, but it doesn't directly affect your gameplay experience.

    It's not like playing a shooter where someone has an aimbot and wallhacks, or a racing game where someone can ram you off the track without slowing themselves down - those things directly ruin your gameplay experience as well as obviously hurting the competitive integrity. I don't think those kinds of games would work at all if they were open-source and without anti-cheat unless there was strict moderation and likely whitelisting in place for servers.

    milicent_bystandr ,

    Chess.

    I rest my case.

    … No I don’t, actually, I have more opinions! Come back!

    I feel like being stringently anti-cheat about video games over internet is grasping at wind. Better to be more relaxed, accept that some will cheat and ‘earn’ themselves a higher elo than they can actually play, and encourage a player base to care about enjoying the game, and to care about winning/enjoying without cheats. If you have to encourage a fanatic player base who would do anything including cheat to get a leg up, maybe you too are forgetting this is only a game.

    And for serious competition? Let the tournament organisers provide the hardware on location.

    paraphrand , (edited )

    An open source and popular MOBA would have an even larger problem with cheating and bad actors.

    Edit: people are missing the point, and I didn’t state it fully.

    What open source games have moderation teams and support teams? What open source games want to deal with ban evasion? What open source games want to deal with the notoriously toxic MOBA communities?

    Voyajer ,
    @Voyajer@lemmy.world avatar

    Security through obscurity clearly isn’t working anyway

    bdonvr ,

    By that logic any sever running something open source like Linux would be more vulnerable than say, Windows.

    paraphrand ,

    I’m not saying it’s because of the source code. It’s because it’s not a commercial product where there is monetary incentive to police the activity of the community.

    How many open source games have support teams and moderation teams?

    tabular , (edited )
    @tabular@lemmy.world avatar

    The creation of cheats would be easier in principle but maybe in knowing than then you wouldn’t design a game where you trust the client in the first place. For example; don’t tell the client the location of every (unseen/unheard) player on the map in an FPS.

    Perhaps there’s an alternative to addressing cheating which hasn’t been explored. Conventional wisdom was pirates are basically people wanting stuff for free so you should invest in DRM to force them to pay for it - now some treat piracy as a service problem where they instead need to offer a better user experience. I think it’s worth investigating if some cheaters would be better satisfied with built-in cheats, and if some non-cheaters would be willing to fight some uneven battles if they knew that’s what they were getting into.

    ryannathans ,

    Aaaand there goes linux support

    BaardFigur ,

    deleted_by_author

    •
    HeyLow ,

    Plenty of people do

    BaardFigur ,

    deleted_by_author

    •
    ryannathans ,

    Why are you explaining this to a random user from the instance on a random thread?

    BaardFigur ,

    deleted_by_author

    •
    chloyster ,

    Because why would a random user not affiliated with the creation of the instance, therefore having no power over the spelling utilized in it, in anyway care

    chocosoldier ,

    if we’re gonna randomly pedant on people it’s “anglicization”. not that anyone cares.

    underscore_ ,

    I think you were looking for anglicisation the other is an Americanisation

    chocosoldier ,

    that’s a matter of dialect, both spellings are widely used and recognized as correct by english speakers the world over, versus “anglification” being entirely made up by one joker trying to flex how smart they are.

    as an aside I really don’t understand the pissing contest over minor spelling variations between the two major dialects of English (a large part of which, a devoted pedant must note, is merely bastardizations of French words), what gets me is stuff that’s the same word for totally different things depending on where you are like chips, biscuit, thong, napkin, pants, etc.

    BaardFigur ,

    deleted_by_author

    •
    HeyLow ,

    Gold coming from someone with over 500 hours on tencent owned games. From my very brief digging and

    deweydecibel ,

    People that care about different things than you.

    Difficult as it is to consider, I know.

    smolyeet ,

    Linux was never supported

    ryannathans ,

    Riot games official statement was that they were okay with linux players and actively went out of their way to make sure they didn’t get banned unjustly. They didn’t support linux as a software platform, which is why wine was required, but they did support linux players.

    milicent_bystandr ,

    That’s cool

    smolyeet ,

    so… they didn’t support Linux. Got it.

    Rentlar ,

    I gave up League years ago when every update the launcher broke, then required some patches done to Wine. I’d known yhe kermel level anticheat would arrive someday but maybe I’m a little surprised it took as long as it did.

    Breve ,

    I find it contradictory how Riot’s own explanation contains the following two statements:

    This isn’t giving us any surveillance capability we didn’t already have.

    The problem here arises from the fact that code executing in kernel-mode can hook the very system calls we would rely on to retrieve our data, modifying the results to appear legitimate in a way we might have difficulty detecting.

    If the first statement was true (which it’s not), then they shouldn’t need any additional capabilities offered by running at the kernel level to surveil the system to detect cheats. As they admit in the second statement though, it is exactly because cheats abuse the OS security model to gain capabilities to both monitor and interfere with the game in an invisible manner that they need to get those additional capabilities to invisibly monitor and interfere with other programs too. The best they can do is a pinky promise that they won’t abuse this power, but they don’t even give us that promise and instead insist they don’t actually have that power. That’s super suspect to me.

    I hope people using cheating software understand the dire security consequences of installing and running that type of software too, especially in that it comes from very shady sources.

    kttnpunk ,
    @kttnpunk@lemmy.world avatar

    Anticheat software, sure that’s what it is. Totally not a excuse to steal total control of a player’s machine, nope not here

    Breve ,

    I mean I’m not going to jump to the conclusion that they are definitely actively doing this, but more that if they openly admitted that their anti-cheat software has the ability to invisibly monitor everything on your computer from your browser to your password manager, then people would be way less accepting of it just because of the potential risk.

    Buddahriffic ,

    Also, it doesn’t even remove the capability of cheating. A virtual machine can hide things from the kernel. I’m not sure if there’s an existing implementation that makes it completely transparent to the guest OS that it’s running on a VM, but it’s technically possible to do that if it’s not already being done.

    A VM-based cheating system would be more complex than a kernel-mode one, but it’s just the next step in the arms race, unless there’s an even easier one I’m not aware of… I suppose hacking their anti-cheat system itself so that the games think it’s working properly might be possible depending on how it’s done, though that can be defeated by an even bigger security hole: giving it the ability to run arbitrary code from the server in kernel mode.

    Another way to cheat that might not be defeatable is to run a hacked version in parallel to a completely legit one. You use the legit one for all server communications and the hacked one to render an overlay over top of the video from the legit copy.

    IMO, the way anti-cheat should be going is behavior analysis of players. Do players behave as if they are aware of information they shouldn’t be, like the location of other players that shouldn’t be visible? Is the player less effective if the server feeds them fake invisible data about non-existent opponents? Is there a correlation between how difficult shots should be and how likely the player is to make them? Does the player’s performance drastically change from time to time, more so than someone getting into the zone or having a bad day? Does the player ever talk about cheating in the game’s text or voice chat?

    Though that’s assuming the cheating is the reason and not an excuse for this.

    Breve ,

    Yup, very true. There’s even the possibility of hardware level cheats, just like that new MSI monitor that analyzes the screen with AI. Imagine that but instead it’s a KVM switch like device that can “see” everything happening on the screen as well as the keyboard and mouse inputs. You could train it to recognize and track enemies in an FPS then add in some extra inputs to correct the aim every time you fire, or activate abilities in a MOBA automatically in response to enemy actions. I think this is what Gameshark might be trying to do. Short of requiring cryptographically secure input devices, the only way to detect this type of cheating would be behavioural.

    Buddahriffic ,

    Another commenter linked a video that goes in to detail about how actual cheats are doing it (my comment was just speculation about what’s possible based on what I know about computers work), and they are doing stuff like that. They use raspberry pis and/or arduinos to analyze the screen (or a small square around the centre where the reticle is). Then they intercept clicks and when one is made, add in the corrections to centre the target and then pass on the click. In this case, the Arduino would have a the mouse and usb/network for the image stream as input and it outputs as if it’s a mouse.

    And as a man in the middle, it would just make the secure connection itself and pretend it’s just a mouse (spoofing whatever IDs it needs to), so I don’t think cryptographically secure mice would make a difference unless the market is willing to accept only buying approved mice that add their public keys to some database. It would just be another front in the arms race.

    Ultimately cheaters have the advantage of having physical access to their device. The scheme we’re talking about would even work on cloud gaming platforms as it’s only using the same information that is already being displayed to the player.

    Buddahriffic ,

    Oh yeah, and for behaviour detection of this, it’s kinda annoying they don’t detect it because I don’t think it would be difficult to do this (either from a problem solving perspective or the amount of computational power that would be required).

    Just track the x and y deltas and their derivative over time (in this case, the derivative is just the difference between the current sample and the previous one, so no calculus required, just a subtraction per sample). Then check if they are continuous. X and y deltas are velocity, which must be continuous because the mouse is a physical object and subject to inertia. Acceleration should also be continuous because of the limitations of our muscles (though if your mouse bumps your keyboard or your hand is moving and bumps your mouse, you can see natural acceleration that isn’t continuous, but these wouldn’t directly preceed a successful shot at a target).

    Then just watch for spikes in either of those. A better cheat program could smooth the spikes, but it slows down the capability of the aim bot.

    KuroeNekoDemon ,

    Wait so the not being able to completely get rid of the Riot client and all their games and it still popped up on my desktop wasn’t me going crazy? It might be Chinese malware in the end? This is just a whole new meaning to that now

    saintshenanigans ,

    There is a chance that it has something to do with the Xbox app, maybe

    ChefKalash , (edited )

    After studying operative systems this semester, it’s crazy that developers are really out there giving level 0 privileges to an application program.

    Get that shit far, far away from my machines

    saintshenanigans ,

    I just mentioned the other day how scary that is if a third party can crack it and just got blasted about how Microsoft wouldn’t put an OS out with vulnerabilities like that lmao

    havokdj ,

    Microsoft literally took government bux to put in NSA backdoors into windows that are still there to this day.

    dangblingus ,

    I assume that anyone that actually cares probably doesn’t play LoL to begin with.

    Shadywack ,
    @Shadywack@lemmy.world avatar

    Cool, PC gaming sucks now anyway.

    Smacks ,
    @Smacks@lemmy.world avatar

    The only good thing to come out of RIOT are the animations. Those don’t require exposing myself to the CCP.

    steelrat ,
    @steelrat@lemmy.world avatar

    What could go wrong with chinese rootkits on leading global games?

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