This is so funny because rust has one of the worst cheating situations and majority of their players are windows users, and theres lots of games that have anticheat that allows linux and have notably less significant cheating problems like marvel rivals. in reality rust doesn’t take cheating very seriously because if they did they would have more server side software that detects illegitimate behaviour like tons of other games do successfully… even most popular Minecraft servers have better functioning anti cheat that is completely server side than rust has while getting kernel access to your pc. its pathetic and lazy development tbh and this entire post from them reads like such extreme cope…
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If your cheat detection runs on the client side only, you don’t have cheat protection.
Well, there only so much in gaming that reasonably can be done server side.
Sure, the server could identify that a player shouldn’t be visible and not transit that location to a client, addressing seeing through walls, in theory.
But once a player is hypothetically visible, aimbot can happen. If you are crawling in a ghillie suit in the grass, but the other player has a client that skips rendering grass and replaces the ghillie suit model with a suit made of traffic cones…
Now intrusive anti cheat isn’t worth it, but it is an unavoidable reality that it is up to the client to preserve the integrity.
Closest you get would be streamed gameplay, where the rendering even is server side. Also not worth it. But even then I could see cheating machine vision and faked controls to get an edge unfairly.
replaces the ghillie suit model with a suit made of traffic cones
lol
Let’s do some math here, they said:
More cheaters using Linux than legit users (…) .01% of all players base
Let’s do a quick math. The maximum peak users for Rust was 259,646 concurrent users according to https://steamcharts.com/app/252490 . Let’s assume 60% (more than half) of all the .01% users were cheaters, congratulations, you got rid of all those 16 cheaters… I haven’t played much Rust, but I’m fairly confident that there’s a bit more than 16 cheaters there.
And that’s without getting into the whole client side anti-cheat doesn’t work.
You dont understand linux users have black magic hacks that ruined the game for every player on every server, their power cant be understated… Theyre a whole bunch of dangerous hardened criminals
I feel like some people think Linux is only for hackers and cybersecurity professionals
And genuine hackers and cybersecurity professionals have got way better things to do than cheat in Rust.
The cheaters are all obnoxious 12-year-olds who couldn’t land a single hit without the cheats, that’s why all the compilation videos of cheaters falling foul to fake cheat software are so funny. They’ll spend 10 minutes trying to go through a doorway without it ever occurring to them that something must be wrong.
🤣 beware the Linux users
“Do not tangle with the type of people who decide to put Linux on their PlayStations. Trust me, you are wasting your time.”
- Extra Credits host guy, like a decade ago.
every single one is a l44t hack3r bro
It was the elite hacker 4chan, they hacked all their servers and stole all their ram.
I don’t play games that require anti-cheat. Simple as that. If a game is full of cheaters, I don’t play those games either. I am not going to have a windows installation just to play games. I am not going to have a console that only plays games. I am a simple man, if it supports Linux and doesn’t have anti-cheat I play. But also I don’t have friends so…
Well the garbage takes itself out
Skill issue.
People who play games to cheat are the problem with the world. Born losers.
Developer of game ‘Rust’ talks about
anticheatrootkits on LinuxThis whole anticheat thing is so stupid. Remember when Sony got sued bigtime for including rootkits on their audio CDs? Why are game developers getting away with it no problem? Society is regressing and it’s frustrating to watch.
People are never interested in learning from history, they’d rather run face first into that wall.
The abusers typically.did read histor, saw what worked well, what didn’t, learned from that to become even better abusers.
This doesn’t only apply to games, it applies to politics, celebrities, religious clerks,you name it
People are never interested in learning from history, they’d rather run face first into that wall.
Just saw a comment in a topic about steam machines about “why do we even need to care about the past, its in the past, it doesnt matter anymore”
humanity is devolving to a state dumber than the chimp that scratches its ass, sniffs its finger, and falls off the log in shock at the smell.
On Windows the cheating program it’s a simple exe that will get kernel access with a simple uac request.
Everyone, especially 12 years olds, are able to run it. (And maybe get malware/ransomware disguised as a cheating program)
None of the losers that need a cheating program to feel validated in online multiplayer games will have the skills to recompile the kernel in Linux to add support for that
None of the losers that need a cheating program to feel validated in online multiplayer games will have the skills to recompile the kernel in Linux to add support for that
aha! so you admit, IT’S POSSIBLE! Well aren’t we lucky we have microshoft who won’t let anyone recompile their colonels! shows you mr silly yunix!
;D
They dropped Linux before proton was invented. Go on any cheat website and the requirements will always say to have windows. Maybe proton is exploited by some cheaters, news to me. You should just ban windows, no more cheaters.
It’s not proton that is exploited. It’s the kernel itself that cannot be monitored by anti-cheats, meaning cheaters could install a modified kernel to mess with the anti-cheat
as if the cheaters can’t already evade anti-cheats even on windows.
Exactly. There are two methods that bypass kernel-level anticheat fairly easily, and there isn’t really any way around them.
You can run the game in a virtual machine, with cheats running at the hypervisor level. This level is more privileged than the virtual machine’s kernel, and can thus read or modify the active program without detection.
The other way is to load the hack into the bootloader, so the cheat loads before the kernel and, again, can thus be in a more privileged permissions state.
The only effective solution is to detect cheating server side, or change the game engine so cheats don’t work (like loading all models with no line of sight behind the player, so wall hacks and modified game models don’t matter.
There’s another whole category that also doesn’t care about what the game is running on the kernel: seperate device cheats. They act as a man in the middle for the input and output signals, and can auto shoot when you’ll hit or adjust your aim if you’re close but not quite there. Or just play for you entirely if it’s that good at processing the output.
And blocking that isn’t likely possible without killing streaming for the game or convincing all users to get input devices with encrypted connections or they can’t play your game.
I’d respond to the original comment that anyone who doesn’t have server side cheat detection isn’t serious about stopping cheaters. In any case, I just removed that game from my wishlist. Not that I needed another survival builder game anyways, though they do tend to catch my eye.
Good point. I remember seeing one about a monitor that can give edge-of-screen glow to indicate proximity of enemies in LoL or DOTA2 based on minimap information.
Fascinating.
I will never understand, how people use their ingenuity to fake being good at a game.
Like, I get the hacker aspect of it: developing a cheat, breaking the game, exploit and find ways around the counter measures. Fair enough. But then you would do it once and showcase it, that wouldn’t disrupt a game’s community.
So there are people out there, who load cheats with the bootloader, in order to pretend being better than some randos in an online game. Wow.
Just look at sports. All those antidrug tests are there for a reason.
Feels a bit different to me though. I mean, while doped in sports it is still you who brings in the results. You can also take, idk, focus-enhancing drugs in esports to have the advantage (I wouldn’t, but I’ve never been very competitive and don’t get it in general). But cheating, like e.g. using aimbots, it detaches the results somehow from you. The equivalent, to me, in sports would be to have somebody go through all the hustle to get competitive and then pretend to be you, so you can get the cup and the pictures afterwards. Just strange ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It’s the same as being the only one to use steroids. Or using methanol in the fuel. Or having a card in your sleeve.
I mean as a electrical engineering student who likes to program, building such a system seems like fun but playing with it not so much. If there was a game that was purly made for cheaters with the goal of beating the anticheat without detection i would love to try that. I feel like this could be something like the capture the flag competitions some groups make where you have to hack a website faster than others or break some encryption.
Desstroying other players without effirt is like playing a game in easy mode and i dont get that at all, where is the fun if there is no challenge?
Same kind of people who lie all the time to look good to others. Some people want to be awesome but know they suck, or even more pathetic don’t suck but can’t stand not being the best, and cheating is their pathway to getting the social results of being awesome without needing to develop the skills.
The way I’ve seen it for ages now, being a loser isn’t just about losing games, it’s how you handle losing games and how much you internalize that. I see it as short for “sore loser”. Cheaters are losers in that sense.
Though it makes the idea of them still losing despite cheating even more hilarious, which is why I love the idea of games that detect cheaters but stick them in cheating queues instead of just banning them.
Maybe it’s mostly kids? Like the genre of kid that told you their dad works for Nintendo so they have Mario 5.
Kids, and people making a profit.
Easier to make a profit off RMT if you bot and cheat.
They probably gave up on preventing cheat entirely, and are just trying to reduce the amount of cheaters by making cheating as annoying as possible.
I do actually believe them when they say that cheating on Linux can be made significantly easier and more comfortable than on Windows. I think it’s a real fundamental issue for Linux, multiplayer games with toxic playerbases can be unplayable due to users being able to do what they want. They would have to make systems to allow for playing in smaller human-moderated servers, or rely purely server-side solutions
And that it self is measurable. Never understood the attempt to have total control on byod setups. Its never going to happen lol
I mean, Linux player base is only .01%, even if they are all cheaters, they will literally have no impact… You can’t say “Linux user base is too small”, and “if you support Linux you want cheaters” at the same time if you want to make sense.
Yeah, but saying “Our codebase is so terrible Linux keep showing us new bugs we won’t fix” or “We can’t sell your personal data with Proton” is worse PR…
Hardware level cheat detection has always been a losing game. I’m a professional in similar area (not games) but it’s fundamentally impossible to do when you dont control physical hardware, it’s stupid. The only way to detect cheaters is machine learning based behavior analysis, period.
TL;DR: skill issue
The only way to detect cheaters is machine learning based behavior analysis, period
Either the entire game industry is incompetent, or you’re wrong. Machine learning is a powerful tool, but the only way? No chance.
Entire game industry is incompetent as in “willfully not doing the best as long as it keeps selling, or not having resources to do it anyway”. I can believe that
Yes they are willingly incompetent because kernel anti cheat costs nothing while ML pipelines would cost thousands if not millions usd in compute and engineering every year.
Luckily now with AI boom it brought down many machine learning costs significantly as well so we’ll see much more server side anti cheat.
Never heard of Rust, but it sounds like something I can afford to ignore.
OS shouldn’t even matter to prevent cheating; do your anticheat validation server side. Anyone who knows anything about security knows the client side can never be trusted.
Ultra toxic survival game where you build a base, get raided by 4 guys with rocket launchers and bombs while yelling slurs at you. Then rinse and repeat.
Yeah Rust is super toxic indeed, bit I think that’s part of the appeal
Did you ever try getting gud?
Oh, I’m very good at avoiding games like that.
I thought that was the trans crab programming language
This is actually one of the absolute worst trade-offs they could have made, if you think about it for like 2 minutes :
They said 0.1% of players were on Linux.
Even if they were ALL cheaters, that’s still a tiny amount of cheaters you just “banned”
Almost 100% of whom will just cheat on Windows instead ; whereas all the legitimate Linux players will loudly complain forever.
They decided to sacrifice all the free PR from one of the most vocal groups of players out there, in order to get a ~ 0% reduction in the number of cheaters.
In more simple terms, they just shot themselves in the foot for no benefit whatsoever (though I do grant it’s a relatively small “gun”)
Not only that, but the steam deck exists, the gabecube is coming, Linux gaming has been on the rise. The shit you did “several years ago” is irrelevant. If they allowed Proton, windows players with steam decks can now also play on the go. Instead they repeatedly have to poorly explain why they won’t… to stop basically 0 cheaters. I’d be willing to bet that the only people who actually stopped cheating in rust when Linux support was dropped did so because they lost interest anyway.
I searched just to see, there’s a python script right on github that claims to have an aimbot, esp, wallhack, no recoil and several other features, along with “safety settings” so you don’t get caught. Does it work? I don’t know, but the codes right there to look at and there are dozens of other results in the search.
The Gabecube. Thank you for that. Totally stealing it.
they actually said 0.01 which is literally only 14 players compared to the average player base… they shot themselves in the foot to fuck with 14 ppl lmfao even though it’s unlikely the number is that small its likely just them exaggerating to make it seem like less people are affected
I also highly doubt their statement that more users were cheating under Linux than not. I’d like to see how they came to this conclusion. And if it’s so easy to identify who was cheating, why not just ban them if it’s .01 players? That’s like 7 or 8 bans. An insignificant amount of effort would go a long way here.
Remember when Apex banned Linux during a cheating low, and then cheaters started trending upward AFTER the ban? Pepperidge Farm remembers.
The garbage took itself out.
Explain something to me. It’s a multiplayer game anything that affects all players should be handled on the server side, not the client. So if I make a cheat it can only be installed client side, not server side.
So if my hypothetical cheat looks at object placement and any time I sees a small object approaching at a high velocity it can say “I’m going to assume that’s a bullet based on what the server told me about it.” Then my cheat would say “your character moves from here to here until the bullet passes by, then moves back. I will tell the server you moved to the left 20 inches in the blink of an eye then moved back”
This works because the server just trusts what it’s told in this example.
So there are two options here to resolve this. Either the server sets thresholds and denies any placement changes look like the Flash is playing rust, or the server evaluates suspicious placement changes later when the cpu load it’s under is lower. The first approach stops much of this instantly but is computationally expensive and could not scale well for lots of players. The second would work well enough. You need to catch cheaters but it’s doesn’t have to be within the same exact cpu cycle.
In either case, these work because the server is taught to look for something that shouldn’t be possible. The enforcement happens server side. The client doesn’t fucking matter.
There is zero reason to put anti cheat on the client side when it’s not a P2P instance. Target a few servers, not thousands of players.
Your head is in the right place, but your example is very wrong. First, unless it’s a very slow projectile that’s not how bullets work in games, second movement takes place in the server, to do so in the client is nuts. Client sends inputs, sever moves, gives back player location, client adapts. While waiting for a reply the client simulates the movement expected, but sometimes the server doesn’t receive the package and so tells you you haven’t actually moved and you teleport back.
What’s usually not done is calculate vision cone, instead the server gives you everyone’s position and you calculate whether you can see them on your GPU. Which is why if you can get access to the GPU pipeline you can tweak it so it shows you objects through walls. If you move the LoS calculation to the server you completely eliminate wallhacks, however that is very expensive to do (although ray tracing GPUs might provide a good approach in the future)
second movement takes place in the server, to do so in the client is nuts.
For the vast majority of games, it’s in between, because the latency if you waited for the server every frame you moved would be way too much.
It’s something like you have a local model of where everything is, and send updates to the server of where your local model says your character (and whatever else your inputs affect) are. The server receives that data, potentially validates it (server side anti cheat checking that your movement makes sense, similar to the OP post, for example), and then forwards that info to all players. The client side positions of everything are updated based on that info. Usually some interpolation is added to make things move more smoothly.
Yes I meant movement happens server side, which is why this example cheat couldnt work. it would be telling the server what to do, and the server could always say “no, fuck off, thats not something you were coded to be able to do”. Sorry if I didnt convey that clearly.
I also understand the client has to draw things faster than the server can respond “okay, I moved you 12 inches to the left” so it guesses the outcome and if the server later responds with “denied, no teleportation in rust” it will just snap you back to the last position the server approved of.
My point is anticheat client side suggests bad code server side.
Yeah but this approach makes the game stutter and/or sluggish for everyone. Client side computation isn’t just cheaper, it also ensures that you have a smooth gaming experience.
As someone else said, most games do a middle way here. Compute on client side. Verify on server side.
Yes but if you are verifying server side anyway, why do you need anti cheat client side?
Well, first off: Money. The more you verify, the more it costs you to run your game’s servers.
But also because you cannot detect every kind of cheat via server side anti-cheat. How does a server detect if my flick-headshot (which won this crucial round) in counter strike was luck, or if I had help from a program running on my machine? Maybe it didn’t even make me react faster, just nudged the cfosshair another few pixels to ensure the hit.
Of course you can run statistics, and can flag outliers. But it’s no proof. If someone always cheats you won’t catch them, while you will flag someone have a good day (or a friend playing on their machine).
Well, first off: Money. The more you verify, the more it costs you to run your game’s servers.
This sounds like a super clever argument, until you think about the scale.
If the cost to host a game went up by 50% it probably wouldn’t make it into an investor call. Its a small price. It could be 10x as much and still be completely affordable to many games companies.
How does a server detect if my flick-headshot (which won this crucial round) in counter strike was luck, or if I had help from a program running on my machine?
How does the client detect that when running said cheat on another machine? It doesn’t. The current solution isn’t perfect either.
I think the one who’s not thinking about the scale is you. As the server owner you pay (compute) for every additional player. This goes directly against the wish to have as many players as possible playing your game.
This discussion spun of from a company stating specifically they don’t want to invest more into anti cheat solutions. And that’s from a company which absolutely could afford it.
How does the client detect that when running said cheat on another machine? It doesn’t.
You make it sound like I said that, but I didn’t. In fact I’m very much against kernel level anti cheat.
The client side anti cheat is a low effort hack that was good enough. Video game anti cheat devs are cheap as fuck because looking at client bits cost nothing compared to expensive machine learning pipelines that need to analyze all player performance. This is not a tech problem but a product/skill one.
You don’t need machine learning for this we’ve had perfectly good server-side anti-cheat for a while now and none of it’s been AI-based until recently. If we know the top speed the game should allow players to move any movement greater than that speed must be a cheat or lag, either way it shouldn’t be allowed.
There’s more to cheating than moving quickly.
Obviously. They gave one of a thousand examples. That doesnt mean their point is weak, it means they didn’t have the will (reasonably) to make their comment 50000 characters long.
If you have a specific example that doesn’t work to a reasonable extent, post that rather than this short, vauge retort.
Wallhack is an obvious one or anything that reads client and modifies the display.
Wallhack could be discovered through machine learning but very difficult I’d imagine. Other simpler rendering hacks like skin swap would be probably the hardest thing to detect server side as there’s no trace.
I think thats a fair ground though. Clearly client side anti cheat simply doesn’t work and if someone wants to put hats on their characters to headshot them easier then let them be the losers they are.
Wallhack is an obvious one or anything that reads client and modifies the display.
Absolutely, but thats strongly mitigated via not giving the client information it doesnt need to know.
Totally thought if you take a look at dota2 cheat scape the losers still come up with ways to mod an edge but a lot of that can be still detected when you put a competent engineers hat. I think the only really undetectable change is model/texture replacement which is honestly not that big of a deal as far as ruining fun for others sort of cheaters.
It’s a huge part of cheating though. Fast movement, auto aiming, and wall hacks are the three biggest problems in cheating and all three can be solved algorithmically, without resorting to AI which is inconsistent and processor intensive.
You check whether the movement is possible for the allowed speed in the game.
You count the hit to miss ratio per weapon and build up statistical averages, anybody using auto aiming is going to be consistently out of that average, obviously you do this with each weapon in the game separately, snipers are obviously going to have a better hit rate than LMGs.
Finally you don’t send data for players that are out of sight. Wall hacks can’t work if the client isn’t given this information.The great thing about all of these techniques is that it’s method agnostic, it doesn’t matter what method the cheaters are using to inject their cheats, because you’re not looking for the injection, you’re looking for the end result.
Battlefield 6 has kernel level anti-cheat and it’s straight up doesn’t work because the cheaters are always ahead of the game. It also doesn’t help that the game is glitchy on its own.
