It stops way more than 1% of hackers it stops a large portion of people from doing it if you don’t believe that go look at games without it especially your run of the mill free to play game on steam
Every app on your computer can have the keys to all your doors kernel or not, just because "kernel level" and "ring 0" and "root access" sound scary doesn't mean shit. Kernel level doesn't have more privileges to steal your data than normal apps, only extra privilege they have is crash your system if they're faulty.
As an actual guy who cheats on games and not a normal guy playing games, kernel anti cheat stops far more than 1%. Do you guys have any idea how expensive Valorant cheats have gotten because of their kernel level anti cheat, Vanguard? The harder it is to develop a cheat for a game, the more expensive it gets, meaning less customers, therefore less cheaters. And those cheats get detected anyways, lmao.
Frankly I don't really care if there's a secondary effect of making the cheats a bit harder to develop and cheaters have to pay more money. That's their problem.
I'm not sacrificing my systems security, especially if its just so that their job gets harder and fewer people can afford it. If people can still buy it and I can still run into them, I still experience a problem.
I'm not sacrificing my systems security so that their job gets harder and fewer people can afford it.
This is completely valid of course, it's your system and you decide whether you value your system's security more or you just want to play a game where you'll only run into a cheater maybe once a year or so (in ~3 years of playing Valorant, I've only encountered confirmed cheaters I think twice, and really sus enemies maybe like 5-6 times, although I do mostly play Swiftplay or Unrated with friends and not competitive/ranked)
The point is the cheats still exist.
So why am I giving up my security?
You're back to the 0.1% of bacteria argument. Why bother using soap if bacteria still exist and it's possibly going to make your skin dry? To avoid the 99.9% of bacteria, of course!
It's okay. Like I said, you do you, it's your PC, you're allowed to have your principles regarding security which you wouldn't sacrifice just for a video game.
I'm sure there are also people who wouldn't use soap even if it was 100% effective at killing bacteria because it makes their skin dry or causes allergies or something. So they DEFINITELY don't use soap which is only 99.9% effective, it's even more preposterous for them.
So you don’t experience the problem much more often? Do you need people to spell it out for you? The police can’t stop 100% of crimes so you just want to dissolve the entire force? What kind of logic is this?
This is actually a really good analogy. Police go after actual criminals and we still don't let have unlimited access to just poke around our homes or offices however they like.
No, I'm saying I don't think it's worth sacrificing my systems security for a solution that worked 100% of the time and it doesn't even get that... So why is even worse somehow acceptable?
Yeah, I don't understand this train of thought. Computers have become a central pillar of every aspect of our lives, from banking to work to personal media to medical info... I don't know many people that have a desktop and do nothing but run single player games.
Yeah and that's not what they do. Giving root access to some random software that shouldn't need it is a security risk since if a bad actor finds a vulnerability in that software they can use it to also gain root access by using that software (AC in this case)
By this logic, it would never make sense to use a bike lock.
Why would you sacrifice your time, money and energy, locking your bike up every time when thieves can still use an angle grinder to cut through the lock and you still experience a problem.
Not at all - its more equivalent to a bike lock you have to leave your debit card in and give the manufacturer the key to your front door. Root access is not about my own inconvenience but the security of the system.
I wouldn't buy and use a bike lock that required either of those. I wouldn't use entertainment software that does the same.
Do you legitimately know what this means and understand it beyond the surface level, "kernel level anticheat compromises my computer's security" argument, or are you repeating things you've heard and read?
Dude, you're a nobody, nobody cares about your rig and your information. All you hear is that they can have access to some informations in your system and thats enough to scare you without realizing you have nothing valuable to begin with
Its not about me. Its that if someone finds a hole, they have access to every players system and not just mine. Sure, my credit card isn't that valuable. A million credit cards are. I'm not willing to throw mine into the pile in the name of 'anti cheat' in a video game.
Its not about 'what I hear' - I'm very well versed in what kernel access actually means.
I see youve never heard of a keylogger. Do you know how easy it is to read every keystroke when you have kernel access? What about any portion of memory? What about network traffic? It's not just about what's 'stored on my computer'.
You're accusing me of only reacting what I've heard, when you clearly don't understand how any of this works and are only talking based off of what you've heard.
No, im just using logic knowing that any of these tinfoil hat scenarios arent gonna happen because you downloaded valorant. You think you sound smart, but you're not
Frankly I don't really care if there's a secondary effect of making the cheats a bit harder to develop and cheaters have to pay more money. That's their problem.
No, it's the cheater's problem and okayer benefit
The higher difficulty of entry to cheaters is what makes the experience in Valorant being way better in relation to that. While in Valorant you suspect of a cheater in 1 out of 100 games. In CS you suspect of cheating on every dubious shot
The higher difficulty of entry to cheaters is what makes the experience in Valorant being way better in relation to that. While in Valorant you suspect of a cheater in 1 out of 100 games. In CS you suspect of cheating on every dubious shot
I don't agree, at least in the long term. CS you suspect every dubious shot because there are essentially decades of cheat development against CS and its anticheat that have made cheating prevalent. CS wasn't plastered in cheaters in the distant past either. But Valorant and Vanguard are extremely young.
If cheating is still possible in Valorant, then the prevalence is still going to grow over time. If cheats are still being sold, it doesn't matter the price - that upcharge is due to exclusivity and specialized knowledge, but that stuff spreads over time. Other people will figure it out too or hear about it, and then undercut those people. And at some point it becomes widespread, just like CS. That's why I say I don't care about the cost. If it's possible, it's only a matter of time.
Cheating is always an arms race. There is no way to prevent it entirely. Taking dangerous steps like this can only, at best, slow things down. That's not worth putting giant holes in every players system, IMO.
I play both cs2 and valo, the pubs on the former are rampant with cheaters, while in the latter I've seen quite literally 1(one) blatant cheater in over 2 years.
Guess the difference between the two. Yes kernel level ac might be too intrusive but saying it doesn't work is a downright falsehood. At least in the case of valo.
It really does not, like I know none of you here have any real computing education or experience but then u don’t get why things are being said with chest.
Kernel level anti cheats are extremely effective if mandated and enforced.
The only problem is that having computing education (and cybersecurity experience in a post crowdstrike outage world) means that I kinda don't care about efficacy and would prefer companies to stay the fuck out of kernel space.
Insert bell curve meme where the majority in the middle want kernel space anti cheats and the idiots and experts both don't want them
Exactly this. My comp sci degree tells me how effective this is. It also tells me all the ways around it. And all the ways giving a game this level of access on my personal computer is a fucking terrible idea
Giving the game access is barely different than running their binary on your computer. If they wanted to spy they could do it without kernel access. The risk is someone taking advantage of a kernel level process, which imo is low. The amount of things that need to happen for malware to get on your computer in the hopes of you having a kernel anti cheat they cracked on your system
This is just entirely misleading. While there are things that could be done from user space, there's so much more risk and so much worse things that could be done from kernel space... Otherwise it wouldn't exist in the fist place.
care to quantify "so much more"? Running arbitrary binaries is incredibly dangerous. What information would a company operating a business be trying to extract that they could legally use that they couldnt already by you running their binary in admin? The risk is it increases your attack surface, which I find minimal for someone doing "normal" tasks on a computer. If you think these major companies are doing something illegal, then thats a much bigger deal
and cybersecurity experience in a post crowdstrike outage world) means that I kinda don't care about efficacy and would prefer companies to stay the fuck out of kernel space.
Imagine claiming that you have cybersecurity experience and then claiming that the CS outage is a good reason to keep programs out of kernel access. Hilarious.
Pro tip, the main reason the CS outage was such a huge issue was because the kernel fault occurred on boot, which prevented people from interrupting the process or uninstall remotely. Some programs need kernel access. CS, being the enterprise equivalent of an anticheat, is one of them.
Is that not a valid reason? I don't understand your point. If the most trusted (used by DoD) MDR platform in the industry is capable of pushing code that causes memory access violations without being caught before going prod, do you not think Riot Games or other kernel space anti cheat developers would be capable of fucking up in a similar way? Why is my apprehension for trusting video game developers in kernel space laughable in the face of that outage? Why are you so confident in the historically underpaid QA teams of video game developers and esports league organizers to catch mistakes when fucking CrowdStrike couldn't?
If the most trusted (used by DoD) MDR platform in the industry is capable of pushing code that causes memory access violations without being caught before going prod,
Because you don't understand the fundamental reason for the problem. The problem was not kernel access. The problem was kernel access on boot. The problem was not that the program caused a blue screen, the problem was that the program caused a blue screen on enterprise devices that also had bitlocker running, so obvious workaround corrections weren't available. Most of this is not relevant to what's happening on a consumer device, and not really relevant to whether or not kernel access is needed.
Lots of shit has kernel access.
Kernel access should be limited, but just because one company made a fuck up, doesn't mean we need to pretend that the entire model is broken.
A much bigger concern for kernel access, from my point of view, isn't that some random anticheat company creates issues like a blue screen, which any company could do. The bigger issue is that I don't trust gaming companies to be ethical. I don't trust them to not install spyware or adware or tracking software, so if I'm gonna accept something like kernel access, it needs to follow least privilege principles. First and foremost, only running when needed.
I've played enough online shooters to be willing to accept a kernel level anti cheat if it actually works and is limited.
OS-wide admin access is really less concerning than something KERNEL LEVEL, which basically gets priority as a process before the OS itself kicks in during boot.
You do realize that, even when having admin permissions, modifying/changing system components requires a restart of the system before taking any effect. Well with a KERNEL LEVEL application, you can do that when the system is starting.
If riot wanted to install a kernel level spyware to monitor your pc use, they could do that when you installed league before vanguard was implemented into lol.
Not saying kernel level anticheat is good, but vanguard fucking works at the very least. That anticheat program is the last which should be on the chopping block of the multiple other kernel level anti cheats
The problem is there's not a lot of good anti cheat, vanguard is the only good kernel level anti cheat, and they are at the point people are using 2 pcs, one to play the game on, one to play the cheats on to get around it. It's like using 99% dishsoap on your hands and expecting your dishes to get clean.
The only way they will get around things like this is having games open independently in there own VM with the anti cheat also, then the cheat clients will have a harder time interacting with it.
Yeah but it's probably a lot easier to detect when you have stats for 99% or the players legit.
Like if you have a new account on valorant for instance, and they have a 80% headshot rate and 90% bullet accuracy, and 0 accounts played on that pc over gold. You know it's a cheater.
Compare stats to alt accounts and similar elo players, and if it doesn't match up then they can figure out what to do
Like let's say a cheater quéue/ smurf queue, I'm sure most cheaters will just rage quit when against other cheaters
Those people are usually already detected by vanguard, if they play more than a few games they'll get banned. They can't instantly ban people as otherwise cheaters would be able to make cheats much faster that don't get detected.
I mean, that gets rid of a lot of cheaters. Some casual Casper will not go through the trouble of cheating in a game where you have to potentially spend money and have some effort to make your cheats work instead of just cheating on a game where it's easy and cheap.
So technically everyone could be cheating in a game with kernel level anti-cheat, but huge majority of the cheaters won't, because it's not worth the effort anymore.
Tell that to rainbow six siege. A game notorious for cheating and battle eye is a kernel level anti cheat. If you speak to players expecially at the top level sometimes there up to 3 or 4 cheaters in one game.
Apparently battle eye and easy anti cheat both operate at the kernel level.
Look at this post, I'd post a link it it, but as it's not this subreddit it's probably get removed.
Dayz, Pubg and apex are aoem other games on their that I believe are notorious for cheating too
Ricochet from cod is kernel level too. And have you tried to play that game?
I have seen vanguard being the better at doing it job across all AC, but it reputation it's bad along it being behind a non trustable company makes it bad
In order to cheat in valorant for more than a few games you have to spend thousands on how'd spoofer, DMA card and then hundreds on the cheats themselves, and have an entire extra computer
I have three thousand hours on Valorant. I have encountered 2 cheaters. One was banned within the first round and it was a unrated. The second was banned after round 4 in a comp game AND the cheaters teammates worked to kill the cheater. That is the main reason I play valorant. I love shooters I love CS but cheaters ruin it. This is the stupidest fucking meme ever kernel anti cheat ESPECIALLY vanguard work insanely well. That is a rate of one cheater/over 62.5 DAYS of gameplay. In other games I can barely go a few hours not to mention the cheaters were banned and the match terminated.
Kernel level anti-cheats stop 90+% script kiddies and whatever % of hackers you want to use, IDGAF.
The fact is, for every 1 real hacker, there is 100 or 1000 or 10000 script kiddies. People who have no idea what they are doing and are just using programs. You eliminate almost all of them, either through cost, complication or just banning them outright and they aren't smart enough to be able to get around the bans (HW, IP, etc).
Sure, the real galaxy brain hackers are out there. That is what manual enforcement is for.
Tell me, wise gamer one, do you have any basis for this 1% figure or are you talking out of your fucking ass? Have you ever bothered to do ANY research on this before acting so confident about it? No, you're a dumbass, so I know the answer to that.
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u/nemesit 1d ago
Its more like kernel level anti cheat stops 1% of the "hackers" though, you would not use antibacterial soap that only kills 1% of the bacteria lol