neatchee

As someone who works in this problem space, I promise you with 100% certainty that the type and quantity of data collection being done without kernel access would be far more distasteful than what’s done with kernel access. You can take my word for that or not but I obviously can’t say any more than that

Including cheating functionality in games is already done and people hate it: it’s called pay-to-win microtransactions.

The archetypes for cheaters are such that they don’t provide ways to please the a large portion of cheaters without harming players because harm is their goal. And the other group is trying to make money by charging for services for players and then cheating to complete those services as fast as possible. There are no in-game features that can be created to mitigate these people.

The only class of cheaters that can be dealt with as a service problem are those that are cheating to a) catch up to others or b) offset a skill shortfall or c) offset a time shortfall. This makes up only a subset of an cheaters

Only some cheaters are a service problem. There are a number of different cheater archetypes and some of them do not respond to service offerings

And believe it or not, while kernel level provides a level of access that could be used for nefarious spying we actually do much MORE stuff people would find distasteful when we DON’T have kernel access, because we have to infer more without direct access to the places where cheat makers do their work

I want you to know that I literally work in this space and you are handwaving away an incredibly complex problem space that hundreds of smart people have been trying to solve for decades now and it’s only getting harder (good cheat suites use hypervisor mods and direct memory access kits these days). I would love to educate this community but I’m under NDA (in addition to not wanting to provide information that attackers can use to better understand how we approach this problem space)

I want you to know that I literally work in this space and you are handwaving away an incredibly complex problem space that hundreds of smart people have been trying to solve for decades now and it’s only getting harder (good cheat suites use hypervisor mods and direct memory access kits these days). I would love to educate this community but I’m under NDA (in addition to not wanting to provide information that attackers can use to better understand how we approach this problem space)

Cool. So tell me how to write a game engine that cannot have its memory read to determine enemy player position with precision and then automate aiming and trigger pulls in a first-person shooter

You have no idea how hard anti-cheat is or how determined attackers are because of the profit incentive.

Are you a videogame networking engineer? Because you’ve just handwaved away one of the most difficult challenges in gaming as if it were “duh that’s easy” level simple.

I can link you some GDC videos that talk about how hard this problem is if you want

ETA: Also you’ve only addressed memory modification attacks. This does not address external aimbots that read memory to determine enemy player position and then send legitimate-but-automated inputs to aim and shoot. How do you stop cheaters from doing this when they can see exactly how data is structured in memory, how values are obfuscated, etc?

Open source competitive multiplayer games would be catastrophically compromised.