Should VAC Be More Invasive?
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Would VAC be better if it had more access to your system? If it was always on? I ATTEMPT a reasoned look at a topic that I'm sure everybody is all sith about...

I would never play a game that has this feature, and it seems that many people feel the same way. But when I say "many people," I really mean just people on niche internet forums. I really don't think the general population gives a shit at all otherwise all these popular games would already be history.

But it does make the case of VAC interesting. So many people including pro players are complaining about how Valve is basically useless when it comes to anti-cheat, and they're correct, primarily because they don't use kernel level detection. I recently watched this video that suggests Valve has some long term vision for their unintrusive software lol. I just can't believe it because e-celebs draw in views, money, interest, etc. and pissing them off as well as the players buying your shit seems counterintuitive. They gotta be cooking up something rightr?

It seems to me that the players who do want a stronger anti-cheat don't care whether or not the studio is watching them whereas those who are adverse to kernel-level anti-cheat will likely not complain about a game being full of cheaters much.

I'm curious if an open-source anti-cheat consortium would be successful, or if this is one of the few cases where security through obfuscation might be the only way to protect anti-cheat software.

Also found out that the high level CS league ESEA has kernel level anti cheat and was caught mining bitcoin lol.

  • brainw0rms [they/them]
    ·
    2 months ago

    Even under the best circumstances where the ring0 anti-cheat developer is not malicious - which I'm absolutely not convinced is always true, mind you - they can be exploited by bad actors to take control of your system via privilege escalation. This isn't even just a hypothetical, it's already happened with basically all that are commonly in use - EAC, GameGuard, BattlEye, XignCode3 all come to mind. It's just bad opsec to run games that use them. You could be doing everything else right with securing your machines and network, and it won't matter. It's leaving the back door open.

    I'm curious if an open-source anti-cheat consortium would be successful, or if this is one of the few cases where security through obfuscation might be the only way to protect anti-cheat software.

    I don't think it would be possible tbh. You are correct in that security through obscurity is the only way these client-side solutions work. There are some amateurish open source anti-cheat frameworks but with the source available everything is easily disabled or bypassed. The only true solution to cheating that isn't invasive is implementing robust server side checking and active human (or hell, even AI could be used for this...) monitoring of anomalous player activity.