HN Reader

Very nice walk-through on the reverse engineering process.

Also, they linked this post that made my jaw drop: https://www.unknowncheats.me/forum/anti-cheat-bypass/667333-...

Apparantly BattleEye anti-cheat had an exploit where hackers could permanently ban any player they wanted. BattleEye allowed anybody to log in as a "game server" so hackers simply booted up a fake server, told BattleEye that "player X has logged in and is doing a bunch of suspicious stuff" and then player X's account was no more...

I'm sorry, why do we trust these guys again?

Ehh, pretty sad there's almost no information on FACEIT anti-cheat. One of the most impactful out there. Wonder if it's just the invasiveness that separates it.

Valve can't replicate even part of it, while CS2 game modes are flooded with cheaters. Most people who chase competitiveness (which CS used to be all about – now it's also skins) just install FACEIT directly and ignore 90% of built-in game content.

Maybe Valve just doesn't want to make the game more difficult to install and sacrifice several % of their user base.

my friends got me in to valorent for a time, but I found the idea of a kernel level anticheat far too invasive

It seems some versions of proton have anti-cheat compatibility patches, for instance for WuWA (still don't really understand why they need some anti-cheats, I have some ideas, but all are not wroth an anti-cheat).

Or just download and check the hash against older versions.

Meanwhile Vanguard can't even stop crashing every game when you have a slightly non bog standard gaming system, e.g. with more than one adaptive sync monitor, Hyper-V or WSL installed ...

This was super interesting.

Unsurprisingly, I see he didn't have much to say about faceit and esea.

I think CSGO anti-cheats are a league above the rest (I'm not sure why, maybe because the scene is more competitive?)

off topic: What's the font this website uses for the code? The font ligatures seem nice, but I also would have to get used to reading code like that.

Basically AC providers put more effort for the AC's resiliency than protecting the CDN. Does this count as Kerchoff's principle?

ESEA shipped their client and anti-cheat with a free bitcoin miner back in the day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESEA_League#Bitcoin_mining_inc...

Slightly off topic, but I really like the design. I'll probably steal fonts.

Funny how the most advanced anti cheat just gives version info and executables in one nicely human friendly package. No need for gimmicks when you the work speaks for itself

fwiw I couldn't find the endpoint in question for vanguard, but I did find for all the riot games

Isn't the age or kernel level anti-cheat tech coming to an end, thanks to Crowdstrike mishap a year ago?

Forgive my ignorance, but why don’t game developers put more effort into limiting the amount of data accessible to the client (restricting it only to what’s reasonably necessary)? For example, couldn’t more movement physics be validated or handled server side? Cheats might still be able to read some data from the game process, but ideally, they’d be limited to issuing inputs like any other player, based only on the same visible output everyone sees. Is it cost? Does this model just not align with how the client/server split looks in games?