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A comment on Valve bans 40k accounts after laying a trap for cheaters in Dota 2. Parent comment

Re:Valve bans 40k accounts after laying a trap for cheaters ... by charcircuit on Friday February 24, 2023 @03:43AM (#34922381)
>It is using your hardware against you such that you will be denied service if the operating state of your system isn't to the service operator's liking.

It's up to the game's developer whether they allow you to join. Either you have hardware that can prove something the developer thinks is trustworthy or you just can't prove your system is trustworthy. Nothing is working against you. Either the developer trusts your hardware or they don't.

>Cheats take advantage of buggy or poorly designed software.

No, they take advantage of a poor security model. If your security model lets random processes read out the location of all of the players is that the game coded poorly or the operating systems fault for letting a cheat read that information? Being able to trust the code that the client in running instead of just the code that the server is running is powerful. It makes developing a secure system easier since it allows you to trust more.

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Re:Valve bans 40k accounts after laying a trap for cheaters ... by worthless-trash on Friday February 24, 2023 @07:24AM (#34923768)
However, you can't verify that the client is trustworthy at any time. Any time i can load a kernel module or run the code in a VM its game over.
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Re:Valve bans 40k accounts after laying a trap for cheaters ... by charcircuit on Friday February 24, 2023 @11:58AM (#34926682)
Which is why secure boot and remote attestation is needed so that the developer can trust that you are not using a non preapproved kernel module not are you using a virtual machine.
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Re:Valve bans 40k accounts after laying a trap for cheaters ... by worthless-trash on Saturday February 25, 2023 @01:18AM (#34934361)
Remote attestation doesn't work if i have permission to modify memory. My kernel module wont even show as loaded...

If you can modify sytem memory its trivial to bypass any checks the anticheat has. To the point where you simply modify the anti cheat in memory to say 'sure i've done all those checks'.

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Re:Valve bans 40k accounts after laying a trap for cheaters ... by charcircuit on Saturday February 25, 2023 @09:02PM (#34942340)
Which is why you need secure boot to prove that there is no way to modify system memory.
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Re:Valve bans 40k accounts after laying a trap for cheaters ... by worthless-trash on Monday February 27, 2023 @12:24AM (#34953318)
I can have secure boot of virtualized hosts, and still modify system memory from either a kernel exploit or virtualised systems host. Cheaters absolutely would install crappy signed kernel modules to achieve this.
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