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Comment by butterfly42069 | Hacker News Reader

butterfly42069

The biggest giveaway the kernel level anti cheat is stupid is that Easy Anti-Cheat works on Linux without kernel level access.

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It only works on Linux if the developer allows it, because it's not nearly as effective on Linux. Rust (the game not the language) uses EAC but doesn't run on Linux by choice for example. Neither does Fortnite. Apex Legends uses EAC and does run on Linux, and now nearly every public cheat for that game targets the Linux version because it's such a soft target.

I don't really like the status quo of installing random kernel-mode crap either, but nobody has a compelling answer for how to not make cheating absolutely trivial without it. Usermode anticheat barely does anything, serverside anticheat can only do so much, and the only other alternative is switching to console platforms which prevent cheating by giving the user zero freedom.

> game targets the Linux version because it's such a soft target.

I was going to say games on Linux should require secure boot so cheat kernels and modules can't run, but then the kernel could just lie about it being enabled.

Most Linux cheats don't even bother with kernel modules, a process running as root can read and write arbitrary memory in the game process without an unprivileged usermode anticheat having any way to know it's happening. It's embarrassingly easy compared to the hoops you have to jump through to maybe avoid detection on Windows.

Right, provenance is an issue.

I suspect the only way that might balance everyone's interests would be to set up a separate OS installation for competitive games. This could be done via bare-metal dual boot, via a hypervisor, or just by having a completely different computer for playing games on (what I have). At least in that world you still have a lot more freedom than you do on console, such as the ability to mod games that don't need anti-cheat (which is almost all of them).

Still wondering what kinda special sauce that Blizzard is using in Overwatch. In my literal thousands of hours of playtime I encountered so few blatant cheaters its probably still in the double digit. Are there probably a good amount of cheaters I didn't realize were cheaters? probably, but does it really matter if you don't realize they are cheating?

PirateSoftware on twitch/youtube talks about his time at blizzard working on catching cheaters in WoW. Their methods are usually about figuring out how they're cheating and what behaviors cheaters follow.

Before overwatch they had years of experience catching cheaters in wow.

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