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.

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!

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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...

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

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"?

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

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.

>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.