tldr for anyone:
They aren't fixing it. fuck y'all.
Also - it's not a rootkit - it just loads at boot and has higher privileges than the userspace that you can't contr.... oh. it's a rootkit. They don't want you to call it that though. It's not cancer... it's a growth.
Stop stealing our CPU cycles for high risk rootkits and start mitigating and detecting cheating on the server.
It's that easy.
I stopped playing games that want this bullshit. Don't need that shit in my life.
I've long believed that the main point of client-side anti-cheat is to serve as security theater.
If the player sees "PROTECTED BY ACME ANTI-CHEAT" on the boot screen of a game, they're less likely to cry wolf when they get their ass kicked. At least, until they see a blatant example of hacking and lose all faith in the ability of the platform to protect them from it; from that point on, everyone better than them must be cheating from their perspective (speaking from firsthand experience here).
Given how infamously toxic and high-strung the LoL community is, I can only imagine that Riot's basically at the end of their rope here. If you read the original forum post, they sure make this sound like a Hail Mary. "Sorry, it's just what we have to do to make sure the game is fair."
Hilariously, they even undercut their own points in the FAQ:
Q: If Vanguard is so good, why do I still see cheats on VALORANT?
For starters, we do not action every cheat or account instantly. Every ban is like broadcasting a signal to the developer that their cheat has been detected and that they need to "update" it. In order to slow the progression of our "cheat arms race," we delay bans based on the sophistication and visibility of the cheat and cheater, respectively.
But also, cheaters gonna cheat. [Emphasis mine.] We've really driven our preventative layer as far as we can feasibly go without colliding with existing setups and hurting legitimate players. [Linux players aren't legitimate I guess?]
Also, they're apparently not bothering enabling Vanguard on OS X because apparently few people have actually developed cheats on it yet. Really tells you what's the more developer friendly platform, Linux or OS X, doesn't it? Or maybe the OS X market share is too small to care.
They do also mention using machine learning to detect cheating server-side but lament that it's not always enough information, and that cheat developers have added "humanization" elements that play more like humans.
My thought is... if a cheat doesn't make someone obviously better than a human player of a certain skill level, then what does it really matter? Congratulations, you made a bot that's indistinguishable from a human, thanks for padding our player numbers.
The real problem is that botters don't pay for microtransactions. And players who buy bot-leveled accounts probably don't spend a ton either. Why would they? They got everything unlocked for them, they didn't have to grind for it. That's all Riot really gives a shit about.
In practice, client side anti cheat is essentially DOA because hardware cheats that analyse the player's screen on a 2nd computer and proxy inputs to your mouse USB have made it so cheat clients are never actually executing code on the host machine.
At that point, even players cant tell someone is cheating because the cheats aren't modifying the game state in a noticeable way- they're still weak to effects that obscure your vision and have inputs that are difficult to differentiate from a "real" player.
IMO cheating is a social problem and one that is totally impossible to beat with rootkits by design.
It's that easy.
I'm guessing you're not a programmer yourself? Because it's really really not that east to /just/ detect in the server side, hacks can be super sofisticsted these days and there are often many client side exploits that you simply cannot detect serverside.
Actually, I am.
Using rootkit anti-cheat is a shortcut that reduces cost for both dev time and hosting time at the expense of your customers' security and CPU. You also have to lay your cards on the table for those who are attacking you. It is not the right solution for this problem.
Authoritative servers. Never trust the client, especially with information the player shouldn't have right now. Look at behaviors and group players based on if you think they cheat or not - let the cheaters play together, no need to spoil their fun and let them realize you know they cheat.
People do some or all of this on the server now, but root kitting all machines to try to solve this problem to play video games is one of the dumbest approaches ever and we will realize it one day when a state level actor pops their zero day against a big install base.
This. Having worked on some in-house anti-cheat solutions myself, it absolutely is just offsetting the processing and security cost to the players. The attack vector of having such a rootkit running on so many devices is just not even close to be worth the trade off of catching marginally (if really measurably at all?) more cheaters.
But... have you considered having control of 0-ring software that runs on hundreds of millions of computers, that can perform targetted updates to change behaviour on just a select few computers, even interact with the network adapters unbeknownst to the OS.
I'm not talking about zero days popping up for this. But rather, this being part of the design?
A less nefarious application: The root kit anti cheats already continuously monitor processes. Say it finds a crypto mining one. It can request the instructions needed to search for a wallet and snatch that off.
A more nefarious one: RK is known to be in the device owned by the kid of a military contractor. Etc.
Trusting the client is a fools errand. So we are in complete agreement. I never understood why the effort isn't placed on server side. People are very good at knowing when others have cheated. They know this from information that exists on the server side, so with the correct classifier, the server should also be able to know this.
I'm a programmer, yes it is. It's not easy in the sense of easy to implement, it's easy in the sense that everything else is impossible. Client-side anti-cheat is impossible, and by that I don't mean hard, I mean perpetual-motion level of impossibility. If someone tells you they implemented a foolproof client-side anti-cheat you should be just as skeptical as if someone tells you they created a perpetual motion. It's impossible, never going to happen, want an example? Robot using a camera to watch the screen and directly moving the mouse and keyboard, completely undetectable from the client side.
From the server perspective the person is cheating or is behaving like a human. If they're behaving like a human their behavior is completely indistinguishable from a human, so who cares if they're cheating?, whatever they're doing has them still at human level so if the game has skill based matchmaking (which most of these games do) he'll rise up until his cheating puts him in the same level of more skilled humans and everyone has fun. If he keeps rising forever he's not on a human level, therefore a cheater. More importantly this also penalizes people who buy bot leveled accounts, because their matches will be all against people they can't hope to win and the game will not be fun.
Server side can also trick clients into giving up that they're cheating, e.g. sending ghosts behind walls to check for wall hacks or other similar things to gauge player responses.
But what do I know? I'm just a senior programmer who's been working on servers for some years. l never worked on the client side anti-cheat though, also never tried to build a perpetual motion machine.
It’s not easy. And league is free. So banning people won’t work well either. They can’t ban ip addresses either without banning college campuses, some apartment buildings, and Internet cafes.
Fuck Riot. Never playing their games again. If you're going to have a shitty anticheat at least give people the option to play in anticheat disabled lobbies. Besides, they should be doing anticheat at the server level not spying on the boot sequence of client PCs. That shit is unnecessary for a fucking banking app let alone a goddamn game. It's just a game, let us enjoy it rather than making such a ridiculously over the top response to cheating.
If you’re going to have a shitty anticheat at least give people the option to play in anticheat disabled lobbies.
This, a thousand times. I can understand requiring anti-cheat for Ranked matches, but some of us just wanna screw around. If there's no progression tied to the match why should they care?
(Microtransactions, if I had to guess)
The "any backdoors we leave open for it" bit kinda sounds like straight-up complaining that they can't compromise users' security without compromising their own control over users' systems?
Boo fucking hoo, I guess 🤷
That's a pretty standard position nowadays from a lot of different tech companies. They can't possibly give the user any freedoms, because it might compromise something. It's this broad assumption that all users that refuse to surrender control of their device should never be trusted and therefore not have their desires respected.
Like how Google continues to actively punish users that claw back control of their devices through custom roms or rooting, and of course Apple has been doing that forever. Microsoft is threatening more invasive restrictions in windows, too. It's why shit like integrity checking is continuing to be pushed.
The pattern is very clear: you are required to let them stick their arm up your device's ass to participate in our "modern" tech space.
It's the equivalent of a store that forces all customers to strip naked before entering to prevent shoplifting. You of course don't have to enter that store, but that store has also run virtually all the other stores out of business, and it's the only one that carries the specific brand of chips you're looking for.
In my country there was a story about a lady who got viral because it had been customary for shops to make people leave their backpacks and purses on a locker or with an employee. Then a security employee also had to check your receipt against the items in your bag before you left. It's extremely annoying and cumbersome, it can add up to half an hour of extra time when the shops are full and there aren't enough employees to do the checks.
So one day she went to buy groceries, before giving her purse to the employee she emptied it and itemized everything there was in there on a piece of paper. Then she bought her groceries and had the clerk double check the price and weight of every item she bought against the price tags and content labels of everything. Including the prepackaged meats. Then, when picking up her purse back, she had the list of items and emptied the bag again in front of the employee.
The manager noticed and went to her mad at what she was doing. She argued with him that they treated her as a thief so she would treat them as thieves themselves and pointed out how she had been charged for an extra plastic bag they didn't gave her (we get charged the price of the bags) and demanded her plastic bag or money back.
Of course nothing came of it, but it riled social media discourse over here for a while. Some low end (local bodegas) and high end stores stopped the practice as the economic situation stabilized later, but it was still a quirky detail of that dark era. Some employees did steal stuff from customers bags sometimes. Same lady had a field day during the days of stores trying to return change on payments with lollipops and candy. So she tried to pay with a bag of candy and lollipops. That one was wild as well.
The issue with this entire statement is that despite the amount of system access they want, and the complexity of the software they've made, cheating is as rampant as it was before. The fact that they continue treating Linux as an issue, just as Ubisoft do with Siege, or Bungie with Destiny, just shows that there is a much larger issue at hand
Even worse, it proves that they themselves don't understand the entire psycho-social scope and workings of cheating. Cheating is not an entirely technical problem. It's multidimensional.
So .. do we have any evidence that rootkits actually decrease the amount of cheating? Like... At all?
The awnser is a firm no. Cheaters have moved to hardware based cheats with DMA boards. On valorant some cheaters have started exploiting remote play services to use machine vision based aim bots. Neither of those two methods can be detected by a kernel level anti cheat.
And now they have more fun working with hardware than software. No needing to reverse engineer the game either since you're just processing display output and executing inputs on separate hardware like an Arduino or Raspberry Pi
it totally decreases the amount of cheating by a lot. Like the biggest decrease in history. That's right. It's huge. /trumpvoice
Also
trust me bro
My main issue with this blog post is that rather than properly addressing concerns, they make fun of them.
It's not a rootkit, journalists just spread misinformation for clicks
Why is it not a rootkit, then??
yesterday, there were just over 800 Linux users on League.
And how many of them were cheating? ರ_ರ
And Vanguard is already being bypassed by using external tools. IIRC I saw a video about it where the cheater had the hack running on a completely separate computer.
How far is the company willing to go to prevent cheating? Cameras in people's homes to make sure they're not using another computer that your anti-cheat has no access to?
If players tolerate that then competitive gaming is going in a deeper dark pit of proprietary spyware in the name of fighting cheating, an arms race with no end.
and the difficulty in securing it is only compounded by all the frustrating differences between distributions.
You DO NOT get to bitch about dIfFeReNcEs while you're writing rootkits. Fuck off.
The "distributions" argument always smells like bullshit. Developers actually interested on supporting Linux usually stick to one or two distros of their choice. (Typically Ubuntu.)
Beyond that: I don't play LoL, but the fact that they need such an aggressive rootkit as anti-cheat hints poor game design. As in, why are your players so eager to cheat?
The “distributions” argument always smells like bullshit. Developers actually interested on supporting Linux usually stick to one or two distros of their choice. (Typically Ubuntu.)
My thoughts exactly. It is not unheard of at all for Linux ports to only be guaranteed to function on specific distros. It's well within the realm of possibility and this is not a real stumbling block at all.
DotA 2 works right? Just upgrade to DotA 2
Yeah, but what if I want:
If not League of Legends, where else am I gonna get all of that from?
I love that you mentioned that abomination they call a client. Something so bad a developer solo wrote a better one only to have them hire that person and quietly kill the project.
WINE
Is
Not
(an)
Emulator
What makes you think they are referring to Wine in that particular case, and not the emulation of the kernel level anticheat on userland? It's also arguably not an entirely correct use of the word there either, but it's fine.
What makes you think they are referring to Wine in that particular case.
Them talking about Lutris and Wine in that same paragraph and using the phrasing "even allowing" implying it's what they're currently doing. But looking again, you're right. They were referring to VMs.
"linux does not allow us a good enough ability to confirm boot state"
Skill issue, L for riot games.
Realistically, if this is true, it's because of security. Shocker on that one really. Also, there are probably only 800 players on linux because the anti cheat doesnt fucking work. But that doesnt count apparently
Honestly, i don't get why people are bitching about it so much. A company, that makes a game with intention to make money off it, that never supported linux neither promised to support linux some time in the future, clarifies that it sees no purpose in supporting linux because of monetary reasons.
Okay, that may be your favorite game, you might have spend tons of money on in - but idea that it may never be supported on your favorite platform has never crossed your mind? It's like whining that PS exclusive game is not getting ported to Xbox.
So basically, “it’s too hard, and our engineers are not good at their jobs.”
Imagine this: you have a cheater problem. Your team of developers have only ever worked on gameplay-related stuff - graphics, game engine, etc. You can:
When money is involved, you make decision by counting them. You give somebody (tech lead, probably) task to evaluate your options - and give you approximate numbers. And i'm not surprised they chose 3rd option.
Stop stealing our CPU cycles for high risk rootkits and start mitigating and detecting cheating on the server. It’s that easy.
I'm currently working on bot detection for web resources - and trust me, it's extremely hard to distinguish them from people without some client-side analysis. Sure, you can use behavioral analysis, but you need lots of data and, again, expertise in that. Okay, they have the data - thousands of games played daily. Have you ever seen job listing for "game patterns analyst for LoL"? Again, you have to find someone capable - highly payed experts, who will spend some time testing their theories, with no guaranteed success.
"How do you separate good players from cheaters? This low ranked player who just got his second pentakill - is he cheating or smurfing? This weird behaviour - is it because of missing fog of war or are they just communicating over voice chat?"
It's just... really NOT that easy.
The “distributions” argument always smells like bullshit. Developers actually interested on supporting Linux usually stick to one or two distros of their choice. (Typically Ubuntu.)
There's your answer - they are not interested. And there is nothing wrong with that! It's just business! Remember the "a times b times c" scene from fight club? They've calculated their x - and it's not worth pursuing (for them).
Rootkits are bad, m'kay. Wanna avoid them? Don't install them. Just don't be surprised when company adds them - it's their product, they do whatever the fuck they want.
I don't believe that only 800 people played on Linux. It makes no sense to me in the grand scheme of things. I have a personal YT channel with only 108 subs and my random low effort video on how to get League running on Steam Deck has almost 70k views which is nuts and there are many other much better videos than mine with many more views. If only 0.1% of those people are active players that would still make a lot more than "800" figure. I know this is just a random speculation but 800 is just waaaay too low.
Those 70k views are probably people like me:
Want to try it and bounce violently off of the toxic ass community
So that 800 might actually be a believable number given you go through some hurdles just to get, well, LOL players
So basically, “it’s too hard, and our engineers are not good at their jobs.”
It's Harder to solve than you think. I came upon a documentary a while ago where they go a bit more in depth on the subject and what cheaters can do nowadays.
No company has solved the problem tbh. Even games like counter strike are riddled with cheaters and even on faceit there's plenty of people that are dodgy AF and likely cheat.
It's not an easy problem to solve and it is, AFAIK, still an unsolved problem in shooters. So your comment is a bit salty. Might as well claim every game engineer worldwide isnt good at their job because nobody has solved this yet. Not that I'm defending riot.
The rootkit "solution" is complete bullshit. It is completely disproportionate and a massive security/privacy risk. And to top it off it's not even a solution that's good enough.
This is the documentary I saw: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwzIq04vd0M&
It did remove my appetite for playing PvP shooters for a while.
The rootkit isn't a solution. It's a bandaid - and a bad one at that. Moba and FPS hacks have already moved outside the hardware of the PC or into the virtual space. It's a beware of dog sign on the fence meant to scare users... while ultimately doing very little (besides providing a vector real hackers and tools can exploit to gain access to your system.)
Seriously anyone willing to install a rootkit on their system that that company is behind deserves whatever comes their way next.
Kernel anticheat is just like gaming piracy, where developers are constantly fighting ghosts rather than tackling the social issues that encourage the behaviours they want to avoid.
there are no social issues you can ever fix to be found here. give a 11 year old an auto-win button for counter strike that he can press whenever he loses a single round and feels his pride hurt - he'll press it.
i think that anti cheats display a disrespect to the customer, because in an ideal world he should then run two computers instead of one. one for online banking, the other one for every company's favorite rootkit with questionable maintenance.
the only way out, in my view, is going to server side ai cheat detection.
I can't believe they made a shitty Dota clone based off the Arcane animation on Netflix.
Makes business sense. Why bother developing for 800 users when you have hundreds of thousands, if not millions, to worry about? The software company I work for has to make this kind of decision all the time.
But it was nice of them to include a viable strategy for cheaters via VMs.
Edit: I should clarify that "business sense" is almost always a poor excuse, and considering the potential growth in the Linux market thanks to handhelds, Proton, and NVK, seems dumb to thumb your nose at that potential.
800 feels like a number they cherry picked considering the overall community size.
Speaking personally: their vm detection is hot garbage and they know it. Detecting a VM is easy enough for anyone- detecting cheating via it is far more difficult. They flag a VM as such and wait for a report to roll in then blindly ban it.... only to reverse it when pressured. This isn't the behavior of an org with concrete evidence. It's a smokescreen.
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