Fighting Online Game Cheating in Hardware

Monk writes "Multiplayer games these days have one problem. Cheating. Cheating is out of control because of failed attempts by software such as Punkbuster, and VALVe's Anti-cheat (VAC). Now it seems that could change change with Intel's own Anti-cheat Software/Hardware."

Comments

there is no technological fix

[circletimessquare]

for a social problem

anything designed by a man can also be broken by a man

the only remedy for human antisocial activity is human social activity. no technology will change that fact. and if you think it can augment those who intend good, then you're right but you must also bear in mind that it can also augment those who intend evil

this applies to security cameras, file trading on the internet, etc. as well as game cheating

Re:there is no technological fix

[AnonymousDivinity]

there is no technological fix for a social problem. anything designed by a man can also be broken by a man.

I don't know about you, but I for one like having locks on my doors. Are they 100% perfect at keeping determined individuals out? Of course not. But that's not their purpose. These kinds of measures merely need to make an activity "not worth it" to those who have some motivation (the aforementioned societal problem). Economic deterrants do work well, at least on a statistical basis.

As for cheating devices, if one were to construct an anti-cheating system that would require a hundred million dollars worth of high tech, rare equipment to break - do you think some gamer is just going to have that kind of money lying around? I'm not saying Intel's solution is of this nature, but this absurd notion on slashdot that technology cannot help/solve societal problems is total bullshit. A lot of social problems are highly context/environment dependent (mostly as a result of human psychological quirks, and evolutionary behavior), and technology can do a lot to alter the environments where people interact to the point where many harmful behaviors are discouraged or stopped altogether.

Re:there is no technological fix

[The Clockwork Troll]

The social problem has an obvious solution: accountability.

If banning of an anonymous ID is the worst any cheater might endure, and they know it, they're going to operate as you would expect someone with impunity to operate.

The obvious solution has obvious problems. The social solution leaves a worse taste in our mouth than cheating. That's why we're chasing it technically.

Re:there is no technological fix

[irc.goatse.cx troll]

latency of two moving people around some obstacle means you either let them both know where eachother is before they should be able to render, or you'll be able to induce lag to allow yourself to teleport around the game which is just as bad.

Then theres issues of "can it be seen through?" for example when I replaced all fences (which in a real engine blurs to solid after some distance). Is it cheating to tweak your drivers with rivatuner to change how it blurs them so you can see through them? What about replacing the texture with an empty texture?
Replacing the enemy models with sold colors?

Even defining cheating with 100% accuracy is impossible, saying you can stop cheating is laughable.

Re:Add the cheats as features to the game

[boaworm]

Because many of these games aim to be realistic, that's why people play them. Adding an "aimbot" as a powerup is not something that would have happened the 101:rd airborne when they dropped down over normandy, so when you play that scenario, neither do you want it or should have it.

Re:Add the cheats as features to the game

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, make an FPS game where everyone automatically has immortality, omnipotence, omnipresence & every conceivable weapon.
Sounds a lot of fun.

It seems rather futile though..

[boaworm]

The whole concept of anti-cheating is based on making a chip comparing input on mouse/keyboard to input into the program.

So how about:

1: Software that wraps this chip, and returns "true" all the time ?
2: Cheats that does not emulate keyboard or mouse input ? (like radars, spike skins, you name it)
3: Software that generate keyboard/mouse interrupts ?
4: The fact that someone would not buy a CPU/MB with anticheat stuff in it if you intend to cheat. You'd just have a dummy driver emulating this hardware or something.

This only seems to be able to solve a very small portion of cheats.

Wow!

[smiltee]

Exactly like DRM, I am sure this restrictive method will work flawlessly! I think Intel is making the right choice by using something you can't update against an entire army of hackers!

Great..

[Khyber]

I'm looking forward to the time when I can't play a game online because some POS hardware/software thinks that my MP3 or video encoder is a cheat mechanism.

Lame, very lame. And you KNOW this will eventually happen. Some harmless software program running at the same time as a game will screw your online play without lube.

Why can't the game devs shift focus away from DRM & etc. and try building a solid product that doesn't NEED a third party anti-cheat software running? It's called internal testing, FFS. You made the software yet you can't find the holes, meanwhile some smartass 15 year old Russian just reads your code and goes "Oh! Look at what we have here!"

The problem with anti-cheat software..

[Animaether]

..is that the server, at some point, has to trust the data the client is sending. Now there's client-side anti-cheat software that will do things like try and make sure that external applications (not entirely unlike the old TSR cheats of lore) aren't altering the data in RAM before it sends the info back to the server. But that client-side anti-cheat software can-and-will be defeated. Eventually there might be an anti-cheat relying on TCPM sort of things, but eventually somebody will just make a TCPM-less version indistinguishable from the TCPM type by the server.

So the only proper anti-cheat lays with the server. But there you hit a problem. You can, for example, prevent some cheats that way. Somebody lobs 2 nades while the server knows he only has 1? Cheating. Somebody moves all over the screen, faster than the player can actually run? Cheating. Wait - or a laggy connection.. or a bug. Tread with caution there. Caution means a margin. A margin means a margin for cheating. Okay, so you don't have your cheat make your player run at 200% - you just make him run at 105%. Still an advantage, and the anti-cheat won't catch it because of the margin. And even when you can detect all the -technical- cheats (more ammo, faster reloads, increased speed, greater jetpack fuel (if there's any), that leaves you with the cheats that cheat the User Input. Aimbots and the like - which can be extremely difficult to detect.

In the end, you can't 100% prevent cheating. But you can make the landscape unattractive enough to cheat in by at least trying to prevent it and having an actual human being look at suspicious behavior from time to time.

( I admin at one of the more popular Soldat servers - we're virtually cheater-free because the cheaters know they'll be busted in no time and their cheating fun ruined by us /kill'ing them (rather than banning - as they'll just be back) and ousting them in public. )

Re:The problem with anti-cheat software..

[PachmanP]

Conversely, servers that better players frequent would be more likely to recognize and bust cheaters. Whereas the n00b servers, people would be more likely to just think the guy was really good, die alot, and give up on the game.

Re:The problem with anti-cheat software..

[fractoid]

This would punish cheaters, sure; but it would also punish those who just happen to be good (on that map in my case). To be honest, I don't care whether they guy that headshots me 5 seconds before I see him, every single time, is cheating or is just really good. Either way it makes the game suck for me, and it presents no challenge for him. Users *should* be grouped by ability level (whether natural or assisted) so that everyone can actually enjoy the game while they're getting good at it. Surely you didn't have as much fun 'owning noobs with your leet sniper skillz' as you would have playing against equally skilled players?

Just one problem?

[Quarters]

Multiplayer games these days have one problem. Cheating.

Really? Just one? What about:

Bad design

High prices

Poor performance

Steep system requirements

Bugs

It's a reputation problem.

[Colin Smith]

You can't trust the person, you can't trust the hardware or the software you can't trust anything which comes back from the client machine.

Da fix? A cross game registry of gamers with identities linked to real addresses and bank details. Something which all the online games can query, though I'd go with hashed values for bank details/address etc rather than real ones. You get caught cheating, you get marked as such. To get rid of the marking you need a new identity.

Will it stop it? Mmm look at the athletes who take drugs, I doubt it. What getting caught would do though is ruin the gaming life in all the games which use the registry. Gaming environments could be split into two areas. One for trustworthy gamers, one for cheating scum.

STOP MODDING UP MEANINGLESS SHIBBOLETHS, PEOPLE.

[mumblestheclown]

For fark's sake people. A statement like "there is no technological fix for a social problem" is just important-sounding nonsense. Really? We seem, after all, to have prevented the problem of people physically reaching out across the internet and strangling people... I have yet to see anybody do this (as much as I'd like to sometimes). Parent poster completely ignores the obvious problem with his arguments: that ALL defense mechanisms are not about absolute defense, but about reducing the rate of successful attacks and/or increasing the barriers to entry (such as technical sophistication, equipment, time, etc) that an attacker must invest in to be successful. Security guards and alarm systems do not prevent all bank robberies - but it is safe to say that there would be more robberies if those things didn't exist. Same here. You may have technological issues as to exactly how much such a hardware defense would decrease the amount of cheating, but it seems fairly obvious that, if implemented, this figure would be greater than zero.