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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."
How about just adding cheats as elements to the game? Players like radar? Add it. The ability to see through walls? Auto aim, auto trigger? Make them power ups. Don't fight it, integrate it.
A friend of mine plays the Final Fantasy XI MMORPG on PlayStation 2. I rigged a little box with a bunch of timers, relays, the heart of a USB keyboard which can repeat timed sequences of game macros without supervision. It works wonders for some "skill-upping".
Intel's little trick wouldn't detect that as it involves no software at all, no injection of keyboard events. As far as the console is concerned, it's a keyboard, period.
I could go a whole lot more sophiticated and build a USB box that would emulate both keyboard and mouse events. Marry that with software that can "look" at the screen data and recognize patterns, and you'd have yourself an automated player.
Go ahead Intel, invent better traps. We'll invent better mice.
As far as casual public server playing goes, there might be another solution: Statistics.
40% aiming accuracy? Too good. 5 headshots in a row? Too good. etc.
It wouldn't even have to have anything to do with cheating, actually. The message a detected player would recieve would be something like this: "Sorry, you are already too good for this server, it's low-skill only. You will be kicked in 5 seconds, so the noobs here will have more fun in a more even and fairer game. Feel free to play on our mid- or high-skill servers over here."
Is that a reference to the horrible, horrible, Chinese pirated Attack of the Clones (subtitled in english-chinese-english translation)?
That always cracks me up. Vader's "NOOOOOOOO" becomes "DO NOT WANT!!!"
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Except the people using aimbots and the like aren't interested in skills - they're interested in the feeling of being invincible, to tear through a map like a mean Rambo look-a-like. Put the cheaters together and they'd have no fun. So what they'd do is find ways to do it anyway, while the good players will get banned by any other name. What are you going to do, start banning people for winning too clearly? Sure, that's incentive... get too good and you get banned on every server except the garbage heap of cheaters, woohoo.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I was appalled at the recent PunkBuster update. Evenbalance has essentially installed a rootkit on my computer without my knowledge. The only reason I noticed is because my firewall suddenly lit up with warnings.
.dll file in your game folder. However, this recent update downloads two .exe files and places one in the game folder, and one in your Windows system folder. PB says these are necessary only for players who want to bypass admin rights for people who play BF1942 or ArmyOps. Apparently so many people are playing these games on their office network and can't log on as administrator on their own computer that Evenbalance has sent out a rootkit with their recent PB update. The programs are mandatory for everyone, though, regardless if you are the administrator. Any player attempting to play on a PB-enabled server without these files, or otherwise blocking these files with a security program, is kicked for "Losing Key Packets" (PB often has trouble with accurate error messages).
Normally, PunkBuster is a
The executables are run upon startup of your computer, and run constantly in the background, regardless of whether you are playing the game. They also intermittently connect to the Internet and send data to Evenbalance's servers. Of course, the player has consented to this (and more) by agreeing to PB's voluminous EULA. In fact, if you read it carefully, players have consented to sending their entire hard drive and hardware information to Evenbalance at any time Evenbalance deems necessary.
Evenbalance will tell you, as support team member Glenn (or someone imitating him) says on a game forum I found: "We're not trying to hide anything or throw anything by the user without his knowledge. These services are doing nothing when a PB-enabled game is not being played, other than waiting to see a PB-enabled game launched. When a PB-enabled game is not being played, we're not scanning your computer or internet traffic or anything of that nature."
Though if you have any sort of firewall on your computer you'll know that that is either total ignorance of their own product or a total lie, as PnkbstrB.exe and PnkbstrA.exe do in fact connect to the Internet while the game is not being played. They also use a large amount of system resources for something that is only supposed to be a service waiting for a game to start.
PunkBuster offers people the option of uninstalling these files, with something called pbsvc.exe which gives you an "UnInstall" option. This doesn't seem to uninstall everything, as the PB files are not only still present but still load on startup despite the uninstaller's "Uninstall Finished!" message.
All-in-all, if PunkBuster cannot even get its act together to create an uninstaller, nor to inform its support team of what a rootkit they just installed on everyone's computer is actually doing, how can anyone expect PunkBuster to detect cheats and hacks? Private home-made hacks can already slip through PB's dragnet--the only ones they can catch are publicly available hacks Evenbalances finds on the Internet, the way a virus detector works, so I think it's pretty clear that the solution does not lie on the player's computer.
Instead I'd say it lies in the programming of the game itself. Wallhacks and radar, for instance, wouldn't work if the server did not send the locations of non-visible players. A difficult task perhaps, and for only one kind of cheat, but it is a real solution. And it doesn't involve uploading my hard drive to Evenbalance and granting them access to information which, as EvenBalance's EULA says, "includes, but is not limited to, devices and any files residing on the hard-drive and in the memory of the computer on which PunkBuster software is installed"