What is the downside of this if I trust the software provider (eg Riot Games or presumably Valve if this ever comes to Linux)? I have recently come around in support of Riot's anticheat because multiplayer competitive games are so damaged without it, even though I use Linux 95% of the time.

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frollogaston 20 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's hard to trust. I have a spare Windows PC where I install whatever on it, and the EA Javelin anticheat has screwed things up before. Wouldn't be doing that on a computer I care about.

Could the kernel have something built in to help with this? Like it can tell a program that nothing else is looking at its memory. And then secure boot attests that the kernel isn't tampered with.

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seba_dos1 17 hours ago | parent [-]

> And then secure boot attests that the kernel isn't tampered with.

That's pretty much a dystopian scenario where you're unable to interact with any network services without using devices with software that's controlled and/or trusted by the service provider. Basically a grave threat to Free Software as a whole, the end of free reimplementations of things you rely on to connect with the society. We already have a glimpse of that on mobile phones controlled by Google and Apple, we don't need more.

There are kinds of games that actually rely on anticheats to be viable, but they're in the tiny minority and I don't think they're worth reorganizing the society over. Most just consider it a solution for problems caused by their incompetently designed netcode.

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frollogaston 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Linux and Windows both already support secure boot. Anyone is free to make a locked down version of Linux, and they have (game consoles, Android). Desktop Linux has way less market share than Windows. So what would you like SteamOS or the Linux kernel to do? I'm not fond of this stuff, but at least if people are using a partially locked down video game focused Linux, it's better than them going to Windows.

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seba_dos1 an hour ago | parent [-]

My comment is about remote attestation, which is incredibly user-hostile technology; not secure boot. Secure boot enables remote attestation, but by itself is mostly harmless.

	▲	frollogaston an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Android and game consoles do remote attestation too.

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dijit 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Attestation-gated anti-cheat is invasive, and the direction it points is grim.

But "covers for incompetently designed netcode" doesn't hold at all.

Netcode and cheat-resistance are mostly orthogonal. Netcode is latency-hiding — prediction, reconciliation, interpolation. Cheating is the client being an endpoint you don't control. You can have flawless netcode and still get wallhacked, because a wallhack touches the renderer, not the wire. You have to ship that data for the client to draw the level.

Server-side validation kills the cheats that surface as state: speedhacks, teleports, impossible positions; but it's blind to the ones that don't touch state at all. A wallhack reads memory the client holds. A vision aimbot runs on a second machine reading the screen- nothing crosses the network for the server to reject.[0]

That's why the kernel and attestation stuff exists. Not lazy devs papering over a bug: a class of cheat that server authority structurally can't reach, because the cheat never lies to the server.

I understand the dystopia argument, and it's a decent one. "Just write better netcode" isn't.

I'd humbly request that you spend time trying to actually grapple with the problem, there are some exceptionally well paid and talented programmers who are working on this non-stop in the large publishing houses (EA, Ubisoft, Tencent, Activision) who would do anything to avoid paying royalties to shitty software that breaks the performance and reliability of their games: yet for some reason year over year they can't seem to manage it.

Worth understanding why that is, instead of assuming incompetence or malice; perhaps its a harder problem than you think.

[0]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.21377

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frollogaston 11 hours ago | parent [-]

I know about the cheating problem and would rather they just not solve it. There are more important things than video games.

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dijit 11 hours ago | parent [-]

Cool,

You're welcome to, but those games precipitously lose players, because it's frustrating.

https://www.reddit.com/r/GTA/comments/1af8t12/online_isnt_fu...

	▲	frollogaston 10 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I know it's frustrating, I really don't care. They can play or do something else. GTA Online from those comments actually does look like a case of bad netcode btw, and it does have kernel anticheat already.

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justaregulanerd 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

My thinking would be that because the anticheat is closed source, it makes it a trust exercise in the developer where you've allowed them root access to your machine.

I'd also think outside of the developer's motives, and into any potential vulnerabilities that could use the anticheat as a privilege escalation point or the anticheat itself being given a bad / malicious update.