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

Punkbuster

[Xlipse]

I've used PB with the latest BF1942 release. I've had ZERO problems with it. I've also noticed a lot LESS cheaters (but still SOME!) on PB enabled servers, which is great. It's worked well for me... so far.

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

similar question on misc@openbsd.org

[nocomment]

A similar question was asked about port knocking on the misc@openbsd.org mailing list the other day. I think it was said best by henning (i think it was henning) "you want to fix buggy software...with more software?"

I kind of have to agree, why not take the time to do it right the first time? 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).

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.

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....

Inverse

[mugnyte]

Howabout a game that encourages cheating? Lag normalized, the constraints are the time you get to react to the incoming stream and build a response. Anything you can do with the incoming data is up to you. I know this gets away from "game" and more into code war, but that sounds more fun overall, especialyl if it lent itself to genetic algorithms. Eh, maybe I just miss Core Wars.

Cheating Death

[cronostitan]

We are running six Half-Life (HL) servers with Counter-Strike and Natural Selection Mods and have found that Cheating death is the best viable solution.

Valve (the makers of HL) are offering their own security engine but its almost worthless since it gets updated rarley and it is aimed to detect cheats only.

Cheating Death on the other hand is aimed not only to detect but to prevent cheats (for example by moving the things you arent supposed to see anyway (player behind wall) to the players back). Because of this Cheating Death can't catch a cheater but his cheats are becoming useless. In addition to that Cheating Death is updated very often and so it is able to prevent most cheats.

Conclusion:
A anti-cheating engine that isn't updated regulary is almost rendered useless in a long run.

Re:Cheating Death

[grumpygrodyguy]

We are running six Half-Life (HL) servers with Counter-Strike and Natural Selection Mods and have found that Cheating death is the best viable solution.

I'm a veteran CS cheater. My favorites were the old speed cheats, and the 'complete' aim-bot, auto-kill cheats that allow you to kill sometimes 15 to 20 people in 1 match.

I was shameless, and loved joining 32player servers just to rape everyone on the server until they left in disgust.

Now you proobably won't see that in a CD or PB server, but most servers are public and people play very casually...usually searching for thier favoriate map as opposed to thier favorite server.

Now I had a very good (6 months?) of whoreage before I was finally busted for good, there is some kind of network which is reported to by admins that regulates WON IDs for all players. If a particular WON ID gets many consecutive complaints...as surely mine did because I cheated like an SOB...then that person's WON ID can be blocked.

My WON ID was blocked for 6 months...that was it...I couldn't play any more CS for 6 months. Let me tell you it was very effective, and I stopped cheating as a result of that experience.(Well...stopped cheating at CS anyhow ;) )

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.

Whenever you keep score

[Anonymous Coward]

Whenever you have a game that keeps score you will have people who try, and many times find a way to cheat. Even when there is nothing to directly gain from it. For the life of me i can't figure it out

BFSecure

[xankar]

Punkbuster is definitely excellent for public servers. It thins out cheaters hugely(but not entirely), and what cheaters there are don't last long on well-adminned servers.

On the other hand, It isn't too hot for competitve play. Updates aren't frequent enough.

I play bf1942 in the TWL 8-man ladder, and I must say, BFSecure is definitely a great tool. Updates are extremely frequent(at least once a week-- i only update before matches). It performs its job exceptionally-- the only thing we have to worry about is people using exploits.

Unfortunately though, as the name suggests, bfsecure is specifically for battlefield. I don't think they could keep up with the cheats if they had to handle multiple games.

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:Different goals...

[Nyhm]

I agreee with malakai's philosophy: anything in the client is suceptible to attack by the local player. However, I do not share malakai's optimism that Palladium (and other DRM technologies) will solve any of this. Rather, it'll just be another level of the same "arms race."

It is a fundamental flaw to attempt to secure what is in the hands of the enemy (to paraphrase a well-said post below).

(OK, so I don't have anything of substance to add, yet. Sorry, I was deliberately wasting your time.)

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.

Push hasn't come to shove yet mostly

[MMaestro]

After reading everyone else's comments, I noted that most of the "successes" anti-cheat programs have attained are largely in the FPS genre and centered around only a few games (namely BF1942, Enemy Territory, Half-Life+mods, and SOF2).

However, I think both the previously made comments and the news report itself is asking a different question for a different topic. Read the title again.

Do Anti-Cheat Systems For Online Games Work?

Note the fact that it merely states 'Online Games', yet everyone here is talking about FPS games. Well what about games like Warcraft 3? Theres currently no Punkbuster support for it (although Blizzard is doing a fairly good job at monitoring and banning cheaters). Theres no (effective 1st party) support for anti-cheating programs for Half-Life and its mods (Punkbuster and Cheating Death don't count).

What I'm trying to say is that this generation of anti-cheat systems is nothing more than a "warm-up" for next-gen games such as Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 (and maybe UT2k4 we'll have to see how its accepted though since its shipping on SIX CDs). We know pretty much anyone who considers themselves a gamer will pick up either HL2, Doom 3 or both so the chances of cheats being written is obviously high. When HL2 comes out (since its being released first), expect to see a complete change in the way anti-cheat systems are implemented in games.

Oh, and to answer the question: Yes, they do work. For now.

Can't really tell...

[sbryant]

It does seem to have gotten better, but sometimes I can't tell if someone really is that good, or if they're cheating. Of course, I don't like being shot round corners by cheaters; bots can also look like cheating players - they are very accurate over long distances, which normal players generally aren't.

One giveaway is ping: it's fair to assume that if someone has got a significantly better ping than you, they are going to get the shots in better. I've noticed that my playing is much better with a ping of 80 than with one of 120 - somehow I miss less the faster my ping is. For many, changing from an old modem to isdn/cable/dsl has at least as big an effect as any cheat would. I therefore think it's fair to suspect someone of cheating when they keep on fragging you although they have a 200 ping and you have 100.

With that said, I don't play on many servers that require anti-cheat programs like punkbuster, although the newer (steam) versions of HL and co seem like they might now have anti-cheat stuff built in.

-- Steve

False Postives

[KurdtX]

I knew a guy in college (back when the anti-cheat programs were just getting popular) who was really good at shooters (particularly UT). In fact, he was too good: if he played on servers that had aimbot detection on he would get banned if he was having a good night. On servers without anti-aimbots the players would decide he was cheating and ban him after a while too. Unfortunately he had to completely retreat from public servers, and only play with people who knew him, although they still bitched about how accurate he was. I actually sat behind him and watched as he would catch a glimpse of someone on the other side of the map, move to a better location, and then heatshot them a few seconds later. He mostly used the sniper rifle, but just because of it's increased power (he got body or head on 90% of shots, so he mostly didn't need more than one shot), he usually made most of the flag caps for his team too.

Re:False Postives

[Dachannien]

I knew this other guy who was playing a bit of Doom 2 against a friend down the hall in the dorms. The guy down the hall had the plasma gun, and was shooting across a wide open room at him. But this guy weaved in and out of all the shots without getting hit, popped the other guy twice with the berserker pack, and killed him that way.

Much swearing was heard from the other end of the hall :)

Banning CD keys

[Carthum]

Banning CD's keys sounds like a good idea to stop cheating but in the end it only hurts the naive players. Those who cheat generally have no problem scamming people out of their cd keys. They are already proved they are dishonest by cheating in the first place.

That happened to me all the time

[Orien]

I don't really have time to play games anymore, but when I was still a student I was hooked on the original Unreal Tournament. Me and a friend of mine were in a clan together and neither one of us ever cheated. Ever. But you know what? We got accused of it all the time. Especially him. I would sit there and watch him and it was amazing how good he was. Almost every map we would play on any server he would have the most frags by about 100. I would be number two about 10 higher than most people, except on 'thorns'. Man, I loved that map. Both of us could get 200 frags and be miles ahead of everyone else. I used to get so tired of these whiny teenage wimps not having enough ego to admit that we were better than them. They would start calling us cheaters and convince the admin to ban us. It got hard to find servers to play on. Of course my friend didn't help the situation any because he loved to talk trash and that would further lead people to think that he cheated. You can imagine the senario:

"How did you kill me!!!!!111 I had full armor and health!"
"It's called a headshot. Get used to them."
"WTF!! You kill me every time I walk around that corner!"
"It's called 'aim', you should get some"
"This SUX0RS. You are using an aim bot :("
"Aim bot? Is bot short for robot? I don't have one of those, but your mother says I love like a robot"
1@|\/|37_69 voted to kick+ban You_Suck

So let that be a lesson to all of you out there. Sometimes people ARE just that good.

I've used both of them.

[Dolemite_the_Wiz]

The problem with both of them, at least when I last played them both, is that both of the anti-cheating devices are not associated with the companies of the games the devices are used for.

I used Punk Buster with Quake 3 Gold and was not able to get it to work due to the lack of help from Id and a problem with XP that prevented the PB updates from fully setting.

I used Cheating-Death when playing the Half-Life WW2 Mod 'Day of Defeat'. On the plus side, this program sucessfully weeded out all the hackers and cheaters very quickly. Updates were made much more frequently than VAC (Valve's Anti-Cheating solution) ever did. I LOVED that CD found the cheats and updated them within a week of being known. VAC? You would have to wait until they released their updates which were few and far between.

The Drawback was that the program WAS developed independently of Valve and the program gave the playing experience many 'challenges'. Most of which were lag related.

So yes, they work but the game companies need to work more closely and quickly with these solutions as they are EXCELLENT solutions to the cheating problems in on-line games.

Dolemite
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