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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."
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
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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.
Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
Aristotele
..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.
/kill'ing them (rather than banning - as they'll just be back) and ousting them in public. )
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
Software that compares the input from the hardware with what the game sees? No problem: just make sure that the input comes from the hardware itself, and not from a piece of emulator software.
I built a cheat box for GTA San Andreas soley because I am lazy. The game requires that the player have their character "exercise" in a gym in order to build strength and stamina. I didn't like the idea of abusing my fingers and keyboard by rapidly typing the necessary keyboard combinations, so I buit a box with three big buttons on it that emulates a USB keyboard. It emits the correct key combinations when I press a button. (NB: I didn't use a programmable keyboard because I'm a hardware guy and was playing with USB anyway. I like my form factor better and used actual arcade game buttons for feel and durability.)
Want to run on the treadmill for the maximum allowed time? Press and hold a button. Want to lift heavy weights quickly and repeatedly? Press a different button. Yes, folks, I was cheating at virtual exercise.
It actually gets worse. I got tired of holding the button down, so I set an old disk drive on it. Then I could just sit back and watch my character get buff. This was the ultimate in laziness: I was cheating at cheating at virtual exercise.
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"