From both a technical perspective and if the maintainers of these anti-cheat will consider porting or re-writing kernel level anti-cheat to work on linux, is it possible? Do you think that the maintainers of kernel level anti-cheat will be adamant in not doing it, or that the kernel even supports it or will support it. I think that if it ever happens, there will be a influx of people moving to linux, or abandoning their duelboots, and that alot of people will hate that such a thing is available on linux.
I surely hope they never will, no user program should ever be allowed to run at kernel level, that’s what malware does.
I personally avoid those kind of games, but those who won’t can dual-boot.
Or…just don’t play those games.
99% of their communities are more toxic than radioactive waste. And, they are not open source and they don’t respect privacy. Because they are greedy.
All true. And yet, plenty of people do want to play those games. And there are other games (Borked) which also cannot be played no matter what. Really annoying, that.
Yeah, some people are just stubborn. By some i mean most. You gotta adapt, what do you think evolution’s trying to tell you?
Sure hope not. If I wanted to run rookits I’d just use Windows. Why bother with Linux?
This is why I don’t want more Linux adoption and don’t understand people cheering every new user. We’re in a sweet spot where a lot of games enable userland anticheat while we don’t get kernel level ports (however they may be shipped doesn’t matter). The only thing that’ll come out of more adoption is kernel level anticheat ports that’ll probably work with a few corporate backed distros only and we’ll actually lose the games we have today. Because those will switch over the kernel level alternatives too.
The only way I’d like Linux to be a generic multiplayer platform is server side anticheats. It is very obviously the way to go and we are seeing extremely slow adoption (e.g. Marvel Rivals).
On one side, I’m one of those glad for people coming to Linux because Linux is truly fantastic and it can make your life easier on many things, I’m happy for them.
On the other side, I share your concerns, because everything that gets adopted by the masses is inevitably subject to enshittification, I would never want that to happen to Linux.
We should find a sweet middle-point tho I have no idea what that would be.
I think the more people who aren’t using corporate operating systems, the better.
I’m firmly against Microsoft, Red Hat, and Ubuntu.
TBH I’m not sure wider adoption would worsen things ? Gaming distros would probably ship bullshit anticheat modules by default while the others would not, or at most provide some documentation on how to opt in.
I think it’s quite similar to the situation with NVIDIA proprietary drivers? (I don’t own a graphics card so I’m not super aware on this topic)
My point is you would either have to run those modules on Linux or not play the games. Which is the same as running them on Windows or not play the games with the exception that you’d lose the games that run on Linux with userland anticheat now.
It’s the other way around. Windows will stop supporting kernel level anti-cheat because of Crowdstrike
I can’t wait until I am able to give random programs kernel access on my system! That doesn’t sound problematic in the least! After all, I have the fullest confidence that for companies developing anticheat, my security is their highest concern! /s
kernel level anti cheat is malware
abandon ranked, return to private lobbies
Short answer: no
Long answer: only the most important things should even have such low-level access to the system. A fucking game is not in that category. Nooooooo
Obligatory Fuck Denuvo. If I had virtually infinite money, I’d do a hostile takeover of Denuvo and burn it to the ground.
From technical point of view it is possible. eBPF already has almost everything needed for doing that. And I think it can be done with a simple LKM but if they want it included in the main tree I’m sure they’ll get some colorful email from Linus.
I really want to see that email.
Absolutely nothing prevents somebody from writing a kernel level anticheat on Linux.
Users would throw a fit, and it would be way easier to bypass, but it certainly could be made.
Every IT-literate person fights kernel-lvl malware disguising as games with everything they got.
Since Linux has a high percentage of those, I hope those “solutions” will never spread
I’m not a programmer or cheater or anything, but I think the answer is yes and no. Yes it could technically be done and even work as intended as long as the device is locked down to prevent the user from replacing the shipped kernel (which would be a bad thing for users). However, savvy people could (in theory) make custom kernels that lie to the kernel module, causing the module to report there is no cheating when there is. It’s my understanding that it’s close to the current situation with Windows and virtual machines and anticheat: you can cheat by running your game in a VM and then have that virtual hardware extract secret information or flip bits in the right spots. Most competitive games will refuse to run in a VM for this reason.
Kernel level anti cheats require secure boot. You can’t just “lie” and load an unsigned kernel.
This is where TPMs, measured boot, and remote attestation come in.
You can run whatever kernel you want, but if it is not an approved kernel, you wouldn’t be able to attest to running an approved kernel; allowing whatever DRM scheme the developer put in to active.
I believe this is how the higher levels of Android’s Play Integrity system work.
When Microsoft first proposed something like that a couple decades ago, it was widely seen as the nightmarish corporate power grab it was. Even mainstream, non-techy publications were critical.
I believe this is how the higher levels of Android’s Play Integrity system work.
It is.
How the fuck did this become acceptable?
deleted by creator
Meanwhile in indie land, I just tried to cheat my way through a Chapter 3 minigame in Deltarune, and Toby Fox himself showed up in his dogsona to blow up the game and make me start the minigame over.
This is the extent to which anti-cheat measures should go.
What does it even mean? People can recompile the kernel to turn the crap off.
You don’t even need to do that. You could just blacklist or delete the module.
The game wouldnt work, but you could do it.
No.
It is probably actually easier to create on linux as it is foss and there are also good projects like eBPF which can maybe even simplify and make it more secure.
I hope to fuck not.
