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.
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.
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