this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2023
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I don't understand how this hasn't been solved yet. The new Texas Chain Saw Massacre game has had massive cheating problems. How is it 2023 but people haven't figured out anticheat yet? Also, how are game companies just not banning these users permanently when they are caught?
I've heard all kinds of rumors about how the server side doesn't do any client traffic validation, et al. I'm a dev by trade so I'm not new to code, but game dev is all a black box to me.
I wonder if it's the cost of data processing the inputs on servers. The ongoing costs of having software handle it on the client machine is close to $0.
Though it feels like democratizing the checks could work. Like, everyone within a match together is checked by everyone else in real time since they're all handling the objects moving around anyways.
Though there are probably many good reasons why that doesn't work or is extremely hard to implement consistently. The idea just came to me
Computers are very fast these days, and if the only thing that computer is doing is data processing it seems like it should not be an overwhelming task. It honestly seems like the perfect use case for something like Kafka. Data stripped of its schema and encoded to be the smallest size possible. Encrypt that if necessary, maybe using some kind of session only encryption beginning at client server handshake, based on some value that's generated inside the game binary.
I'm sure it's difficult to engineer, but it shouldn't be impossible. I'd love to understand what the current processes are and why things are failing horribly.
They fail because you can't trust a machine that an adversary has in their physical possession.
Software running on an untrusted computer can have code and memory injected or modified without modifying the executable files. Binary executable files are by necessity readable and someone with enough time can parse through them to fully deobfuscate and figure out what they are doing. Anti-anti-cheat systems basically perform the same code as the anti-cheat but slightly modify the result to hide the cheating. This can be done either by code swapping in the anti-cheat or at a higher level. If the anti-cheat system is looking at which processes are running then have the system feed it the real list of processes with the cheat processes removed... etc.
Trusted computing requires hardware level monitoring, validated certificates, and zero vulnerabilities since the time the certificate was provisioned. In addition, current technology would also require those base certificates to be regularly rotated and device decertified if it didn't rotate in time to prevent physical offline hardware attacks on the certificate data. Even game consoles don't have this level of platform trust and are often physically modified to enable cheating/piracy.
The only successful way to prevent most cheating is to run the simulation entirely server-side and then only send data to each client according to what they should know. Even then you won't be able to prevent assisted cheating like aim-bots or texture replacements.
I guess if you want to accurately want to do the checks on the server side you'd have to run the complete game on the server. You can cheat just by making a texture transparent so that you can see enemies behind it. To prevent that the server has to render the frames itself and to ensure that really only approved things are seen by the players the easiest would be to just send over the rendered frame instead of letting the players render it themselves. By that point you have basically invented game streaming again.
Still, I wonder what Blizzard games are doing. They work fine on Linux and I haven't heard much about cheating on there.
It seems like VAC has solved the binary editing issue a while ago, no?