alt Hacker NewsAll of this is beyond horrific.
Mucking about in the kernel basically bypasses the entire security and stability model of the OS. And this is not theoretical, people have been rooted through buggy anticheats software, where the game sent malicious calls to the kernel, and hijacked to anti cheat to gain root access.
Even in a more benign case, people often get 'gremlins', weird failures and BSOD due to some kernel apis being intercepted and overridden incorrectly.
The solution here is to establish root of trust from boot, and use the OSes sandboxing features (like Job Objects on NT and other stuff). Providing a secure execution environment is the OS developers' job.
Every sane approach to security relies on keeping the bad guys out, not mitigating the damage they can do once they're in.
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Every sane approach to security relies on checking you are doing permitted actions on the server, not locking down the client.
Are you saying that the solution here is to sell computers so locked down that no user can install anything other than verified software?
> Every sane approach to security relies on keeping the bad guys out, not mitigating the damage they can do once they're in.
That’s not true at all in the field of cybersecurity in general, and I have doubts that it’s true in the subset of the field that has to do with anticheat.
You want to eliminate the freedom of running the software you desire for everyone to hopefully mitigate cheating?
>Mucking about in the kernel basically bypasses the entire security and stability model of the OS. And this is not theoretical, people have been rooted through buggy anticheats software, where the game sent malicious calls to the kernel, and hijacked to anti cheat to gain root access.
If you got RCE in the game itself, it's effectively game over for any data you have on the computer.
>All of this is beyond horrific.
Hot take: It's also totally unnecessary. The entire arms race is stupid.
Proper anti-cheat needs to be 0% invasive to be effective; server-side analysis plus client-side with no special privileges.
The problem is laziness, lack of creativity and greed. Most publishers want to push games out the door as fast as possible, so they treat anti-cheat as a low-budget afterthought. That usually means reaching for generic solutions that are relatively easy to implement because they try to be as turn-key as possible.
This reductionist "Oh no! We have to lock down their access to video output and raw input! Therefore, no VMs or Linux for anyone!" is idiotic. Especially when it flies in the face of Valve's prevailing trend towards Linux as a proper gaming platform.
There's so many local-only, privacy-preserving anti-cheat approaches that can be done with both software and dirt cheap hardware peripherals. Of course, if anyone ever figures that out, publishers will probably twist it towards invasive harvesting of data.
I'd love to be playing Marathon right now, but Bungie just wholesale doesn't support Linux nor VMs. Cool. That's $40 they won't get from me, multiply by about 5-10x for my friends. Add in the negative reviews that are preventing the game's Steam rating from reaching Overwhelmingly Positive and the damage to sales is significant.
yes. this is why there's one box for work, & another for play.
Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on what side of the fence you live), boot chain security is not taken as seriously in the PC ecosystem as it is on phones. As as a result, even if you relying on os features, you cannot trust them. This is doubly the case in situations where the user owns the kernel (eg Linux) or hypervisor. Attestation would work, but the number of users that you could probably successfully attest are on on a trustworthy setup is fairly small, so it's not really a realistic option. And that is why they must reach for other options. Keep in mind that even if it's not foolproof, if it reduces the number of cheaters by a statistically significant amount, it's worthwhile.
I really thought this might change over time given strong desire for useful attestation by major actors like banks and media companies, but apparently they cannot exert the same level of influence on the PC industry as they have on the mobile industry.