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Comment by Archit3ch | Hacker News Reader

Before: it wasn't possible to run these specific games that require this competitive anti-cheat on Linux.

So you can ignore the newly-enabled games in this proposal and you're not missing anything you had previously.

True, and at least until the new scheme supports Steam hardware, it's unlikely that vendors that support user-mode EAC today will move to require kernel EAC tomorrow, since I assume Steam Deck users represent the majority of their Linux player base.

This is a risk if Valve plays along in the future, however, or if players are willing to migrate away from the Steam ecosystem to run games that require the new scheme.

If this were about solely myself and no one else, I might agree. However, even I do play one or two games that use EAC v1 and they work perfectly fine on Linux. They also have very few cheaters, and employ behavior-based detection as their first line. I would hate to lose those games.

Games have already begun to remove Linux support, most notably Apex Legends and Wardogs. Embark (The Finals, Arc Raiders) recently gave a talk that userspace anti-cheat is dead and they plan to enforce similar requirements.

And it's all a shame, in my opinion. They're too lazy to develop effective behavior-based anticheat (should be easier than ever with better NN architectures and more compute), and so they resolve to screwing over consumers or spying on them. Did not know about Embark's stance, that's too bad.

How is Valve’s VACNET doing? I think you should take a look at what’s happening in Counter-Strike 2 these days to see what the true frontier of ML based anticheat looks like.

Frankly at this point I’m pretty sure John McDonald plays HvH too

I play CS2 plenty. The cheating problem is overstated as all hell. It seems to be concentrated around accounts that are being sold for lots of cash, so Valve is apparently taking that route for banning accounts more often lately.

Now, if we want an interesting case study in intrusive anticheat not necessarily being more effective than behavior-based, we should compare FACEIT to Valve servers. FACEIT is riddled with cheaters, and yet requires ring-0 anticheat on Windows. So fascinating!

What ranks are you playing on? While a player of any rank can buy Neverlose and win and if they wanna just pwn cleans they can buy Midnight (speaking of buying P2Cs: if Faceit is apparently riddled with cheaters, where can I buy a P2C that I can pwn on Faceit with for an affordable price?), said cyber athletes will naturally gravitate towards higher ranks.

> FACEIT is riddled with cheaters

According to sources of… what? In any case it’s sure as shit less riddled with cheaters than Premier LMAO

I haven't kept up with mainstream gaming in a while. IIRC, EAC v1 doesn't require TPM 2.0 and thus is security theater, right? An attacker could just tamper the binary.

The same goes for a binary protected by TPM 2.0, but the attacker would have to re-implement the protected parts. The defender's bet is that this should require too much effort/time/knowledge to bother.

I would argue TPM 2.0 is the security theater. A leaked key is all it takes to throw it all away. EAC v1 combined with behavior-based detection seems to be sufficient for some of these studios, so I don't know what Epic is struggling with.

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