I’m curious what would he the definition of Ring 0 anti-cheat
There’s a bunch of game studios that think they need to use ring zero to prevent cheaters. And basically the user is just told ‘trust me bro’ that they’re not going to mess up your system.
https://youtu.be/LY2hG-_asKU?si=R8UAcZ4fQAR8Mlic
Riot games just recently added it I believe.
I personally refuse to play any game that is ring zero. And this big outage is a clear example as to why it’s a bad idea to give random devs unlimited access to your machine.
The problem is if anti-cheat does not have full access but the cheat does, the cheat can just hide itself. Same for anti-virus vs viruses. It’s particularly nasty on free-to-play games where ban evading really just means you have to get a new e-mail. It’s the same reason why some anti-cheats block running games in VMs. Is it fool proof? Hell no! Does it deter anybody not willing to buy hardware to evade VM detection or run the cheat on completely separate hardware? Yes.
Personally, I’d prefer having a stake/reputation system where one can argue that they can be trusted with weaker anti-cheat because if you do detect cheating then I lose multiplayer/trading/cosmetics on the account I’ve spent $80 USD or more on. Effectively making the cost of cheating $80 minimum for each failed attempt. Haven’t spent $80 yet? Then use the aggressive anti-cheat.
Here’s a decent definition: https://levvvel.com/games-with-kernel-level-anti-cheat-software/
As I understand, on Windows, this is implemented by writing a kernel-mode device driver. On Linux, you’d need to load a kernel module.
