Do Anti-Cheat Systems For Online Games Work?

Mr Wriggle writes "There is nothing worse than playing your favorite game online game, only to have someone frag you and your teammates blatantly using cheats. As many of you are aware, there are various Anti-Cheat systems available i.e. Punkbuster and Cheating Death. PunkBuster comes bundled in some games and is mandatory to play certain games on certain servers. I would like to ask the Slashdot community whether you think these systems work well, or do they cause more problems than they solve? Or is there a solution that the anti-cheat developers have overlooked? Additionally, is the locking-out of CD keys of people caught cheating the reason why more and more viruses attempt to steal CD keys of such games?"

Comments

Punks!

[mahdi13]

I only play on Enemy Territory servers that use Punkbuster. I have had no problems with them (except when my client refuses to update so I have to manually update it, no big deal)
I'd say the cheaters on these servers are few and far between, if one is discovered the admins are quick to remove them

I like it

[ptrangerv8]

To a degree...

I play SOF2 on a PB enabled server... in fact, I search exclusively for those servers... I've noticed a couple of cheaters so far, but by far, it seems to work out quite well..

Same goes for Enemy territory - not very many cheaters, and generally makes the game 'funner' to play...

One thing I *did* notice was that when the 'sync gameplay' was enabled (I think thats what it's called) that it would slow everyones FPS down without really telling anyone about it... so people would have laglike issues on a BRAND NEW machine - but other than that no problems at all...

As far as bannign Invalid CD-Keys - what a waste of time....

PunkBuster works pretty well

[JMZero]

Lately I've been playing Enemy Territory mostly, and only on PunkBusted servers. For a while, wallhacks were fairly common in ET (when you're spectating someone, detecting wallhackery is fairly easy) - but I haven't noticed a cheater for a long time now.

PB seems to work as advertised, and has never given me any problems. If it's letting some cheats through, it's not enough that it would affect my enjoyment of the game. If someone cares more about the outcome (or their performance), I suppose they may want a more foolproof tool - but PB is good enough for me.

Different goals...

[malakai]

The first goal of most games is to be 'playable' over broadband with moderate latency. In order to accomplish this certain tradeoffs must be made. These are not bugs.

The 'long' jump in Quake is hardly a 'cheat' that PunkBuster is designed for. PunkBuster purpose is to remove client mods that give you auto-aim, radar/enemy position info, and enemy texture/highlighting type cheats. All of these involve modifying the client.

Yes, the client knows where all the players are. Yes that is a weakness. No it can't be fixed easily, because we have to deal with 60ms-200ms one way latency. That requires some think ahead, which means giving the client more info than they should have. If this was any other type of software than a FPS game we could suffer performance for security.

Programs like Punkbuster use arms-race philosphy to try and stay ahead of the cheat makers. Far less time goes into defeating a specific cheat, then it does to build that cheat. One small change to the pb client and away goes 2weeks coding work of a cheat-maker. PB tries to guarantee the client environment, including memory, and what they see on screen. The pb screen captuing util is the best defeense for an admin.

Having said all that, it's logically impossible for them to do this 100% effectively. You can not control and audit access the the system memory and devices on modern day motherboards. Anything you have running to check this can be modified.

It will take technology such as Pallidum to make true 'anti-cheat' and balanced playing environments. I welcome the day game programmers can trust the client and leverage caching techniques that require pervasive knowledge of the game world. It will make games faster and more enjoyable for a broader range of peple in geographically disparate areas.

Re:similar question on misc@openbsd.org

[ctr2sprt]

Cheats are just creative uses of bad loops, or algorythms in the code (for example the long jump in quake III if you had a fast video card).

No, those are exploits. Most cheats hook programs or key DLLs (like opengl.dll) and replace parts of the code, for example to aim for the player or make his walls transparent. If you're not that familiar with Windows, it's functionally identical to... I forget the exact environment variable name, it's LD_PRELOAD or something. It's not possible for programs to prevent this, as the replacement occurs at the level of the dynamic linker - the application has nothing to do with it.

The issue is that you can just as easily use this trick to bypass protection methods like CD and PB. And, much like antivirus software, even small changes of existing cheats/viruses will usually elude the fingerprint checks of countermeasures.

America's Army - cheats are "built in"

[jspraul]

punk busters is supposed to keep america's army players in line, and it pretty much does as much as it can.

however, it doesn't help that the developers decided to include a 'dev mode' or something that's basically providing a bunch of built-in cheats even in the latest 2.00a version.