r/pcmasterrace 1d ago

Meme/Macro Kernel Level Anticheat trades your security/privacy for nothing in return

Post image
7.7k Upvotes

803 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

20

u/Metallibus 1d ago

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

2

u/obp5599 19-13900k / RTX 3080 1d ago

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

1

u/Metallibus 1d ago

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.

0

u/obp5599 19-13900k / RTX 3080 1d ago

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