'I had my fun' says hacker who used Call of Duty anti-cheat exploit to ban 'thousands upon thousands' of innocent players - eviltoast
  • dontgooglefinderscult@lemmings.world
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    5 days ago

    To your first point pseudorandom variations don’t actually change the method of detection or it’s effectiveness. Heuristic pattern matching as described will work until the movement and shots are no longer accurate enough or fast enough to matter.

    To your second point, all anticheats do that. Kernel level anticheat looks at the running memory of all other programs. That’s the difference. It can detect and scan anything that is open on your machine. Got a Firefox tab open with your bank details? Kernel level anti cheat knows it. Running obs and streaming? Hope obs has active encryption for your stream key in memory, because the anti cheat can grab it otherwise.

    If it just looked at the memory of the affected game literally no one would have a problem with it, that’s all anticheats.

    Kernel level anticheat means you trust the entirety of your computer and everything running on it to at least the game publisher, if not an additional anticheat company.

    • Sas [she/her]@beehaw.org
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      5 days ago

      Interestingly enough valve has tried your method of catching cheaters your way by pattern matching with a neutral network in csgo. Sadly they never got to the confidence level where they made it automatically ban people because they didn’t want to catch really good players in the crossfire. Instead they send them to overwatch, a system where sufficiently good players could judge the case and determine if the person is cheating.

      But also there’s many different types of cheats and that will only gets you so far. Information plays a big role in cs so wall hacks can go undetected if the player masks then which they do since they know they’re probably watched. There’s also subtle aim bot for that reason that doesn’t snap your aim to your enemy precisely but corrects your manual aim by just correcting it a tiny bit.

      As the other user described, it is an arms race and so far the cheaters keep finding ways to trick the algorithm after each ban wave. I still admire valve for not going kernel level with their anti cheat and trying the complicated and interesting route instead. However i think that is because valve tried kernel level when it was still resisted by gamers so they got big backlash at the time and went back to regular anti cheat.

      I think what worked best for me was trust factor, which rates the trustworthiness of your steam account and since i have a legit account I’ve not played against cheaters since they implemented it and until i stopped playing. It sucks for new players with new steam accounts tho as they get matched with a lot of cheaters.