Why are you booing him? He’s right. I haven’t played battlefield since battlefield 2. Every time I’ve installed the sequels it’s filled with cheaters invisible running around in the sky at hyperspeed with rocketlaunchers and headshots fuck all that. I liked battlefield. If you tell me that all I need to do to negate the security concern of the kernel level anticheat is to run the dualboot windows partition im already running for games, why the fuck wouldn’t I be satisfied with a kernel level anticheat if its keeping invisible skygods out of my team shooter?
I care about privacy but this guy says its a non-issue if you do a very small amount of work i’ve already done. Downvotes don’t explain how he’s wrong, and it makes intuitive sense that installing a kernel level anticheat would only affect the windows kernel it was installed on not the linux kernel on the other drive partition. like, i’ve got my graphene pixel phone i got on sale for privacy, and i’ve got a shitty little ‘burner’ phone for like banking apps and google maps. how is this significantly different? why can’t I have my cake and eat it too? What’s the point of cake if I can’t eat it?
If you tell me that all I need to do to negate the security concern of the kernel level anticheat is to run the dualboot windows partition…
…it makes intuitive sense that installing a kernel level anticheat would only affect the windows kernel it was installed on not the linux kernel on the other drive partition.
The intuition is incorrect if acknowledging that the kernel-level anticheats are not necessarily trusted. Operating systems interact with low-level hardware and firmware on the system. As such, it is not self-contained.
There exists both UEFI bootkits and firmware implants. Its intuitive if you understand it like this: if there exists a communication pathway from (A) lower-privilege code -> (B) higher-privilege code, there exists the potential for vulnerabilities.
This is due to (A) now having an effect on the code execution for (B).
Who’s “this guy” that says privacy is a “non-issue”? A kernel level anti-cheat has basically any possible permission on your computer. Even if you trust the game dev or publisher to not do anything other than trying to catch cheaters (you shouldn’t), you are not safe from a vulnerability in said anti-cheat that could be exploited by malicious actors.
Also, kernel level anti-cheat is far from being a silver bullet. You can use an hypervisor, that runs even higher in the chain than the anti-cheat. There are DMA cards that allow you to read game memory from outside your system. You can use a secondary computer, with a capture card, that will use computer vision to cheat.
Those options are harder to implement, but far from impossible, and are already being sold.
All of this to say, as others have said, that the only true way to fight cheating is by implementing the anti-cheat server side.
it was the guy i was responding to directly who said it and it doesnt matter who said it, its true or not. the general thrust tho is something like, whats the privacy concern at all if im running a dedicated gaming partition? suppose i do trust ea well enough to give them blanket lermission on my win10 partition. what could they do with it if my linux partition is separated? what am i actually risking? they could run a botnet ig? i feel like anything they could try to do would automatically be under prohibitively intense scrutiny. not that i trust ea, im just ignorant and u seem like u wanna actually correct me instead of telling me im stupid with a downvote. i may be stupid but i try to get better.
So yeah, as you said if you dual boot your non gaming OS will stay untouched, outside of the anti-cheat’s influence, so you don’t risk much this way. I’d imagine that you would still use your credit card on your gaming OS to buy games, so that particular information stays at risk.
Yes, of course they will be under some scrutiny, but I’d prefer if they just didn’t do it. Your use case is very far from applying to the majority of users who simply run Windows for everything they do.
And there’s still the danger of vulnerabilities in the anti-cheat. For exemple, last year, this happened. It’s not exactly the same as the anti-cheat but the tech is close enough. The TL;DR is that CrowdStrike has a platform that runs at kernel level, and an update to the tool had a bug which prevented Windows from booting, instead crashing to a BSOD. Now, CrowdStrike is a security company, and a generally well regarded one at that. It doesn’t prevent them from making mistakes. So how can you trust that anti-cheat to be without vulnerability? You simply cannot.
Running around in the sky at hyperspeed is a fine example of the kind of cheating that can easily be prevented server side and would be impossible if your game was designed correctly.
Personally I have no interest in keeping a Windows system around at all, so anything that relies on its kernel internals is never going to be useful for people like me. But that’s not the only problem with “kernel level” anticheat. Many people who are willing to run actual Windows do so because they find it useful for more than playing just one game, and do not want its security and integrity compromised in order to temporarily slow down the cheaters for one lazy game dev who can’t be bothered to find better ways.
Games have no business messing around with the OS kernel. For people who know things about computers, it just feels wrong — in much the same way as forcibly locking everyone inside at night in order to prevent nocturnal burglaries would be wrong, even if it was completely effective.
There are many possible approaches, depending on the specifics of the game and the level of effort one’s willing to put into it. Plenty of techniques to choose from. Messing with the client-side OS kernel is one that will soon be looked back on as a ridiculous dead-end approach that wasted a lot of people’s time until we all realized it was futile, sort of like the way they used to use deliberate sector misalignments to produce disk i/o errors to prevent people copying floppy disks.
No, I rely on a bro from Riot Games to come round and lock me in, so they can be sure I won’t go out at night and commit crimes.
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Why are you booing him? He’s right. I haven’t played battlefield since battlefield 2. Every time I’ve installed the sequels it’s filled with cheaters invisible running around in the sky at hyperspeed with rocketlaunchers and headshots fuck all that. I liked battlefield. If you tell me that all I need to do to negate the security concern of the kernel level anticheat is to run the dualboot windows partition im already running for games, why the fuck wouldn’t I be satisfied with a kernel level anticheat if its keeping invisible skygods out of my team shooter?
I care about privacy but this guy says its a non-issue if you do a very small amount of work i’ve already done. Downvotes don’t explain how he’s wrong, and it makes intuitive sense that installing a kernel level anticheat would only affect the windows kernel it was installed on not the linux kernel on the other drive partition. like, i’ve got my graphene pixel phone i got on sale for privacy, and i’ve got a shitty little ‘burner’ phone for like banking apps and google maps. how is this significantly different? why can’t I have my cake and eat it too? What’s the point of cake if I can’t eat it?
The intuition is incorrect if acknowledging that the kernel-level anticheats are not necessarily trusted. Operating systems interact with low-level hardware and firmware on the system. As such, it is not self-contained.
https://www.kaspersky.com/about/press-releases/more-elusive-and-more-persistent-the-third-known-firmware-bootkit-shows-major-advancement
There exists both UEFI bootkits and firmware implants. Its intuitive if you understand it like this: if there exists a communication pathway from (A) lower-privilege code -> (B) higher-privilege code, there exists the potential for vulnerabilities.
This is due to (A) now having an effect on the code execution for (B).
Who’s “this guy” that says privacy is a “non-issue”? A kernel level anti-cheat has basically any possible permission on your computer. Even if you trust the game dev or publisher to not do anything other than trying to catch cheaters (you shouldn’t), you are not safe from a vulnerability in said anti-cheat that could be exploited by malicious actors.
Also, kernel level anti-cheat is far from being a silver bullet. You can use an hypervisor, that runs even higher in the chain than the anti-cheat. There are DMA cards that allow you to read game memory from outside your system. You can use a secondary computer, with a capture card, that will use computer vision to cheat.
Those options are harder to implement, but far from impossible, and are already being sold.
All of this to say, as others have said, that the only true way to fight cheating is by implementing the anti-cheat server side.
it was the guy i was responding to directly who said it and it doesnt matter who said it, its true or not. the general thrust tho is something like, whats the privacy concern at all if im running a dedicated gaming partition? suppose i do trust ea well enough to give them blanket lermission on my win10 partition. what could they do with it if my linux partition is separated? what am i actually risking? they could run a botnet ig? i feel like anything they could try to do would automatically be under prohibitively intense scrutiny. not that i trust ea, im just ignorant and u seem like u wanna actually correct me instead of telling me im stupid with a downvote. i may be stupid but i try to get better.
So yeah, as you said if you dual boot your non gaming OS will stay untouched, outside of the anti-cheat’s influence, so you don’t risk much this way. I’d imagine that you would still use your credit card on your gaming OS to buy games, so that particular information stays at risk.
Yes, of course they will be under some scrutiny, but I’d prefer if they just didn’t do it. Your use case is very far from applying to the majority of users who simply run Windows for everything they do.
And there’s still the danger of vulnerabilities in the anti-cheat. For exemple, last year, this happened. It’s not exactly the same as the anti-cheat but the tech is close enough. The TL;DR is that CrowdStrike has a platform that runs at kernel level, and an update to the tool had a bug which prevented Windows from booting, instead crashing to a BSOD. Now, CrowdStrike is a security company, and a generally well regarded one at that. It doesn’t prevent them from making mistakes. So how can you trust that anti-cheat to be without vulnerability? You simply cannot.
Running around in the sky at hyperspeed is a fine example of the kind of cheating that can easily be prevented server side and would be impossible if your game was designed correctly.
Personally I have no interest in keeping a Windows system around at all, so anything that relies on its kernel internals is never going to be useful for people like me. But that’s not the only problem with “kernel level” anticheat. Many people who are willing to run actual Windows do so because they find it useful for more than playing just one game, and do not want its security and integrity compromised in order to temporarily slow down the cheaters for one lazy game dev who can’t be bothered to find better ways.
Games have no business messing around with the OS kernel. For people who know things about computers, it just feels wrong — in much the same way as forcibly locking everyone inside at night in order to prevent nocturnal burglaries would be wrong, even if it was completely effective.
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It’s a big complicated topic. Here’s one link to help you get started if you actually want to learn about it: https://www.cse.cuhk.edu.hk/~cslui/PUBLICATION/detect_cheat.pdf
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There are many possible approaches, depending on the specifics of the game and the level of effort one’s willing to put into it. Plenty of techniques to choose from. Messing with the client-side OS kernel is one that will soon be looked back on as a ridiculous dead-end approach that wasted a lot of people’s time until we all realized it was futile, sort of like the way they used to use deliberate sector misalignments to produce disk i/o errors to prevent people copying floppy disks.
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deleted by creator