Rockstar Games’ servers have been under heavy fire from massive DDoS attacks in recent days, causing widespread login and connectivity issues for players of GTA Online. These attacks come in the wake of Rockstar’s recent implementation of BattlEye, a new anti-cheat system designed to crack down on in-game cheating, sparking backlash from a segment of the player base. Protesters, unhappy with the new system, have resorted to using distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks to disrupt the servers, escalating tensions between the gaming giant and its community.
What if the cheat runs in the kernel? I am also against these extremely invasive anti-cheat measures, but it must be clear to everyone that the cheat developers and users have no qualms about this.
A user level AC can do shit all against that if the cheat runs in ring 0.
A) They can actually invest in server-side detection
B) Cheats running at ring0 aren’t invisible, unkillable maybe, but AC just needs to detect to ban/kick user
There’s no excuse for kernel AC, it’s just a cheap, lazy shortcut
Every rootkit ever disagrees with that statement.
I’m not deep enough in the topic to be able to judge this, but i would guess the needed extra hardware is simple not worth it. especially in games with many players or complex physics i would guess that could lead to considerable load on the servers.
Plus, server side is not able to catch things the client manipulates on his side. e.g. graphical data to make walls transparent. The server could at most catch the player abusing this knowledge, but if he is smart about it, the server has no way to ever notice.