Comment by iscoelho | Hacker News Reader

Comment by iscoelho | Hacker News Reader

In my opinion, the debate about kernel anti-cheat on Windows is disingenuous fear-mongering. I'm confused why Hacker News of all places misrepresents the technical details.

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.

>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).

Most complaints about kernel level are indeed about privacy, and as you say a user space process can already do so much that this argument is moot. Most people are not aware or ignore it to fear monger because anything kernel sounds really bad.

> In my opinion, the debate about kernel anti-cheat on Windows is fear-mongering

I don't think a lot of people who complain about kernel anti-cheat actually play competitive games.

I feel someone doesn't need to play competitive games to be able to give an honest assessment of the privacy & security risks.

I'm sad I'm not seeing that honesty elsewhere in this thread.

It certainly is helpful to understand the mindset of a person who: a.) their hobby is to play competitive games which mandate kernel level (or similar intrusive anti-cheat)

b.) either accepts the requirements or builds sufficient security gapping to make it a nonconsideration.

These people exist, and would say in an honest assesmment that the above behavior is no more rights-intrusive than what 99 percent of the tech absorbing population allow today.

Exactly, those people are installing Windows in the first place, it's already an entire spyware OS. It doesn't matter cause they pretty much only use it only for games.

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