Getting a Steam Deck has done wonders for my piece of mind. I don't need to worry if whatever games I'm installing are malicious, because the machine is airgapped from anything critical.
Ultimately, this is why we have consoles. We can have rootkits, or we can have cheating. Nobody has solved cheat prevention without rootkits. If you can, you’d make millions, if not billions. It’s not like the game creators want to have software on your system that has the potential to brick your system.
The real solution is games designed for playing with friends and treat all non-friend players as potentially malicious.
Early first-person shooter games had this figured out (small servers with 20-30 regular players, the server admin could choose to ban you), RTS games have this figured out, many MMOs have this figured out (interact with non-friends sometimes, but they have to 'join your party', etc.)
Playing with random strangers on the internet who may want to grief/destroy your game, be incredibly toxic, or cheat against you in general.. that's the cost of playing with random people in a completely public forum.
But people largely want matchmaking. They don't want to deal with having to find a server of like-minded players, they want to hop in a lobby with maybe a few friends, pick a map pool, and go.
Nah. Consoles were a decade late to the online gaming party, and online gaming on consoles (counting Xbox Live as the first concerted attempt) has only been around half as long as consoles as a product segment have existed.
Running games in a VM appliance or an immutable container type of environment could be neat. Or some kind of hardware device. Like a console on an expansion card that could enable a secure environment while still letting you use your hardware.
This is a false dichotomy. Genshin is single player. Some people play multiplayer only with friends. The only legit use for anti-cheat is competitive multiplayer with strangers.
Not sure if you're referencing it but there was a recent scandal where it was suspected someone playing against Magnus might have had a wireless butt plug to enable some cheating...
The sibling comment makes a point about anonymity, I find these discussions interesting in comparison with the only online competitive game I play these days. It's Tekken, and neither the current rendition nor the previous one had any real form of anti-cheat. For the current Tekken 8, supposedly some players have been banned after manual review from the company of replay data, which of course doesn't scale. But at the same time it doesn't really matter. Cheaters don't seem to be that prevalent, their ability to spoil the experience of a match is limited by the fact that matches are short, and people can spoil the experience in non-cheating ways like plugging, lag switching, using a weak computer, and for some sensitive players they'll get unreasonably upset by ki charging/teabagging/taunting/continuing an attack after KO. The status of the highest rank is also not that much -- the most status comes from performing well at the big in-person tournaments, where it's going to be harder to cheat and players are somewhat de-anonymized. If the positive incentives to cheat are minimized in the first place, you don't need so many negative incentives like rootkits.
(It always amazes me how custom controllers and even keyboards are allowed in fighting game tournaments, officially certain macros are banned and at least for Street Fighter certain modes of leverless controllers got banned, but it'd be hard to perfectly enforce. And it's been hilarious to see the increasing use of fake buttons or controller-hiding covers/jackets because it was assumed some players were able to see inputs out of their peripheral vision before they were registered in-game and adjust.)
Hmm, here’s a thought I’ve never had (but might be obvious to others).
Could I run windows as a VM guest under Linux and play Fortnite in that (with good GPU performance)? I don’t mind their rootkit running on some dedicated VM - I’ll just consider it my Fortnite unikernel.
(I’m also ok with the host OS being Windows or MacOS).
Running a VM gives the parent the ability to read/write arbitrary memory without [even rootkit] anticheat being able to detect, which can facilitate cheating, and therefore can earn you bans. The whole point of the rootkit is that the game can confirm that you don’t have any way to read/write arbitrary memory.
Isn't Windows running under a hyper-v hypervisor these days anyway?
In practice, I'd settle for a peer Windows OS, like the WSL2 kernel, with the rootkit seperate from my main work one. Can I run two copies of Windows simultaneously as peers?
If you've already put a piece of hardware into your computer made by nvidia, installing a kernel driver also made by nvidia does not increase your risk at all.
Installing some random anti-cheat kernel driver is not the same thing, at all.
But you are not installing a random anti-cheat kernel driver, you're installing anti-cheat kernel driver provided by a game you've already put on your computer. It's very much the same thing.
User space applications can't access hardware or physical memory. They can't bypass permissions enforced by the OS. None of that applies to hardware or kernel drivers.
> This isn’t giving us any surveillance capability we didn’t already have. If we cared about grandma’s secret recipe for the perfect Christmas casserole, we’d find no issue in obtaining it strictly from user-mode and then selling it to The Food Network. The purpose of this upgrade is to monitor system state for integrity (so we can trust our data) and to make it harder for cheaters to tamper with our games (so you can’t blame aimbots for personal failure).
Where did I say they are the same? We have a kernel-space thing (anti-cheat or gpu driver) and a user-space thing ((a game actually talks to both) that talks to a kernel-space thing.
I understood that you were making an analogy between installing a piece of hardware and its associated kernel driver with installing a game and its associated kernel anticheat.
When you install a hardware device you are trusting the manufacturer with full access to your machine, so installing a driver does not give them any more powers. You have already "unlocked the door".
When you install a game that runs on user space you are not trusting the vendor nearly as much as you are trusting a hardware manufacturer. Installing a kernel anti cheat is granting them a level of trust and access to your machine that they didn't have before.
> Most people do install Nvidia’s out‐of‐tree graphics driver
Most people that use Nvidia. I specifically don't buy Nvidia graphics cards or laptops that use them in my Linux computers because they're not in-tree.
- This is an abnormal case. Most hardware will work with in-tree drivers. Indeed, few vendors provide out-of-tree drivers for Linux.
- Nvidia is an established and reputable source. We aren't talking about some small hardware developer who doesn't have the resources to create secure drivers.
- Most Nvidia cards have in-tree drivers. There is a loss in performance, but the option usually exists.
It's a risk, but a very minor additional one - if you trust their hardware with direct access to your PCIe bus, you have already given them the metaphorical keys to the vault.
I can't play certain games, because they don't run on Linux and even if they did, I am not gonna install a rootkit to run them.