Valorant

[Slimy Time]

To me, what's more concerning is the fact that everything works so ass-backwards nowadays that there's a good chance some jeet at Riot Games will fuck something up and this bricking will affect normal systems. Then if something like this becomes widely used (because a big company like Riot uses it, so everyone has to try it), there's a bigger chance of this going sideways. I don't care if you love or hate cheaters. The fact that this is even possible in the first place and that someone has this much control over your hardware is fucking nuts.

Fuck something up or someone vindictive does it. Just basic security concern that playing a game should not have code that nukes your computer if something gets flagged.

 

[Leakage Current]

My god, you people haven't touched an IOMMU in your life.

You can use IOMMU to set device-based permissions for pages.
If a device tries to access a page it doesn't have permissions for, a page fault is generated.
If that page fault isn't handled, your OS crashes. Just fix your driver.

That being said, if I was a cheat dev I'd mask my hardware as legitimate hardware that requires DMA access so Vanguard inevitably false-positives a whole bunch of users.

Any anti-cheat is a losing proposition because you have unlimited hardware access.
I can whip up a completely undetectable MITM-based attack by making a DIMM interposer with a FPGA on it. FPGA intercepts the raw memory accesses and allows you to do anything you want to them.

Memory encryption isn't supported outside of server CPUs, and the game can't store everything in registers. Sure, they could probably find some way to make it more difficult but there literally are no limits to what you can do given enough motivation.

 

[Enne]

Everyone keeps saying it's a slippery slope as if Valorant isn't 6 years old with nobody at all copying their example, nobody wants to invest in this shit, you can't convince executives this is worth any money at all especially with how much people throw a fit about it every year.

Also how is there no responsibility from the person hooking up DMA hardware to their PC to know what they're doing? They said you now had to enable IOMMU to play, if you had to enable it to play then it can only really be anti cheat, the retards then enabled this, started the game up then tried to cheat despite this new thing being implemented. Am I supposed to feel sorry for someone who sees a sign saying "don't walk into my property or I'll shoot you in the head" and decides to ignore it?

This whole thing is retarded, if you don't like it then don't play the game and if enough people do this then they may reconsider, if they don't then find another video game to play.

On top of this, every time I see people sperging about anti cheat they're getting more upset about this than being raped by Windows day in day out, does nobody have actual priorities? Where is this collective outage for Windows being turned into spyware trash that barely even works and crashes and corrupts the install every update? How can I begin to get invested or care about anti cheat in a game I don't play when everyone's a nigger cattle sitting on Windows (which you need to play these games) getting raped in the ass by Indians?

 

[Goblin Troll]

Lol if you play video games competitively you're not a cool person like me, a Kiwi Farms user who always uses 100% of my time efficiently and for things that benefit me.

 

[Urgunt]

I was legit close to relapsing and reinstalling league of legends the other day but vanguard simply refused to install, so thank you Rito games my favorite small indie company from saving me from playing one of your games. Anyways the existence of DMA cheats was a mystery to me until now, it's kind of nigger behavior but I do find the programming/development aspect really interesting.

 

[Miragestallio]

Holy shit bro, between that one fag exposing trainwrecks' IP and now this. What the fuck. How is incompetence on this level possible. This is the most retarded industry by far. I remember some dude on EA saying it was unfair that their company was nominated as the worst company because banks and insurance companies constantly fuck people over, but the gaming industry really is dead set on intentionally one upping them for real it seems. This is maddening.

 

[The Ugly One]

"You went over the speed limit. For that, we're having your car turned into a cube."

You can't get banned from roadways or have your vehicle impounded for breaking laws, so this is a good analogy.

 

[YOU'RE TAKING TOO LONG]

What the fuck is a Valorant and why is it rage baiting for attention? Making me angry about a product won't make me want to buy it, it'll just make me angry and ignore your product more and call you, creator of product, a homophobic slur and possibly an ethnic slur.

Just do want Bloons does. "Oi, you cheating? Special cheaters lobby for you. Pat pat, there's a good cheater" don't even make it obvious, just give them their own separate sandbox.

 

[The Ugly One]

So if I understand correctly it's not as bad as bricking and mainly done by triggering a flag that already exists on Windows. But still overkill for what amounts to cheating in an online game, with the important question if it will be triggered for any "infringment" of bullshit EULA that is non negotiable.

It amounts to introducing malware to your system to cheat. The malware then gets blocked from system access because it's malware.

Since we're making increasingly dumb analogies,

Suppose your car, a brand new Honda, had built-in Sirius XM. You don't want to pay for it (because it's gay). You discover a hack: by drinking a fifth of vodka and blowing hot stinky booze breath all over the center console, something overloads, and for whatever reason, you have Sirius access. But it turns out that your car also has a booze sensor, and when you trigger it, a big flashing sign appears on the back of your car, "THIS NIGGER IS DRUNK!" The police then pull you over, and you are so fucking blasted that you lose your license, thereby losing access to public roads, thereby making your car useless to you.

Valorant = SiriusXM
Riot Anti-Cheat = Honda
Cheat device = Vodka
Windows = The state government

Here's the point of the analogy. You can cry all you want that Honda is violating your privacy. Perhaps it is. But it's not Honda or SiriusXM who blocked you out of the roads. It's the government. You didn't get blocked from the roads because you tried to cheat SiriusXM. You got blocked from the roads because you got roaring drunk and started driving.

this is a fucking videogame. Why does it need to access the kernel/hypervisor-level in the first place, why does it have to be a fucking malware

Because people are introducing cheats at the kernel/hypervisor level that behave like malware.

Malware or no, brick or no, there should be boundaries to what companies can do, and that should be one.

Serious question, what should Windows be allowed to do when it detects an unsigned device is spoofing a legit device and trying to hijack another program's memory?

 

[cancelmysubscription]

Can't we hate both riot and the fags using hardware level cheats?

This feels like two different specicies of vermin fighting.

I’ll happily hate both while only understanding ~60% of the situation.

I’d also like a poll as to who commenting on the issue owns one of the $5800 devices, owns a different but similar device or who owns none of that shit.

 

[The Ugly One]

Yes it did.

Nope, all the hardware was still 100% functional.

The actual person who gets to decide that is the person who has to fix it. Not you.

You can disable IOMMU in the BIOS, run Linux, and allow shady devices to use your machine all you want. You can plug a made-in-China Hackercard that does nothing but run keyloggers and send all your data directly to Russian gangsters all day long. You just can't play Valorant if you do that. But you still have freedom over your machine.

Your arguments back then were also wrong and the things you defended back then were also unreasonable.

Ah, you're also one of the people who doesn't understand what hardware-embedded keys do. Everything makes so much more sense now.

You are in the wrong and the things you make excuses for are also wrong. It's wrong and unreasonable, no matter what you or the people who feed you this bullshit tell themselves

The only people in this thread who can actually explain what happened on a technical level agree with me. The people who disagree with me are consistently unable to explain what happened and even getting basic technical details wrong, like claiming the hardware itself was damaged. Just like how in the TPM argument, nobody who disagreed with me understood what a TPM does. They just knew it was bad because it involves cryptography and Microsoft, and that makes it evil.

This affects everyone who bought this game because now they are all at risk the corpo will harm their stuff. It affects everyone else because it encourages similar abuse from other corpos. It's just wrong. Inappropriate. No ToS or excuse, or lie can make it otherwise.

Okay, so explain what Windows should be allowed to do when an unsigned device spoofs a legit device and tries to inject code into a running program's memory.

 

[Baraka Obama]

What does that have to do with fucking up everyones day by cheating? I know im in the extreme minority here but anyone who has ever played competitively knows that people doing this kind of shit just fuck it up for everyone else.

Riot isn't trying to brick my car. They're not trying to brick my house. Yeah I get it, slippery slope and all that but... I just dont care.

I used to play Unreal Tournament 2004 online. It used to be fun. It stopped being fun when people took it too seriously and played "competitively." I don't play online games at all anymore because of these people.

 

[Smithfield Ham]

"Someone tried to steal my car! But then they spontaneously combusted?!"

"Oh, that's our remote anti-theft technology. It lefts us burn the driver to death whenever we want if we suspect they're a thief."

 

[⋖ cørdion ⋗]

I used to play Unreal Tournament 2004 online. It used to be fun. It stopped being fun when people took it too seriously and played "competitively." I don't play online games at all anymore because of these people.

I've played thousands of hours of 6v6 TF2, even in some tournaments. Fun disappeared the fucking second it became official matches for scores. Mixing with the boys and swapping around classes was fun. Like playing a new Tekken with the boys, but you all got ~30 mins to practice a main before going ham. Nobody is a complete mashing retard but also not good at their character, cause at that point it's fubar.

 

[Nick Gars]

Because the same way your day can get fucked up for cheating (deserved) is the exact same way your day can get fucked up for cybercrime reasons.
Do you really trust companies with modern hiring standards with that level of access to your computer?

The Crowdstrike incident that happened within living memory was made possible by the fact that Crowdstrike has kernel level access, just like Riot Vanguard anti-cheat. This essentially shut down a good part of the corporate sector worldwide, along with airports, rail hubs and so on, for a day or two. It would have taken a lot longer to solve if it wasn't a mistake from an otherwise good company with plenty of actual competent programmers to throw at the problem.

What if next time it's not even a jeetcode error? I can't think of a much better way for a bad actor (state-sponsored or not) to get access to a bunch of high-powered PCs for malicious purposes at once than managing to hijack anti-cheat software for a game.

Here's another example: in 2017, the biggest freight company in the world, Maersk, got shut down so hard that they only managed to get back their ransomware'd database because an agency of theirs in Africa hadn't connected to the Internet for a couple of weeks.
How did this happen? An automatic update to a word processing software a branch used. Again, global shipping ground to a halt for two weeks because of an automatic update.

And all this potential danger to stop cheating in video games. It's like putting down landmines in your house to deal with mice.

Are Hardware/MAC bans not a thing anymore? Is it really so impossible to stop cheaters that bending over and giving a company the keys to your house as they fuck you is the only option? I have a really fucking hard time believing that.

 

[The Ugly One]

And all this potential danger to stop cheating in video games. It's like putting down landmines in your house to deal with mice.

How is your system put in danger by blocking spoofed devices that inject code into memory windows they aren't supposed to have access to?

 

[Tyrannosaurus rex]

Kill cheaters. Behead cheaters. Roundhouse kick a cheater into the concrete. Slam dunk a cheater baby into the trashcan. Crucify filthy hackers. Defecate in a cheaters food. Launch cheaters into the sun. Stir fry cheaters in a wok. Toss cheaters into active volcanoes. Urinate into a cheaters gas tank. Judo throw cheaters into a wood chipper. Twist cheaters heads off. Report cheaters to the IRS. Karate chop cheaters in half. Curb stomp pregnant hacker babies. Trap hackers in quicksand. Crush hackers in the trash compactor. Liquefy hackers in a vat of acid. Eat hackers for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

 

[Leakage Current]

Anyways the existence of DMA cheats was a mystery to me until now, it's kind of nigger behavior but I do find the programming/development aspect really interesting.

Cheating is dumb but I hate anti-cheat enough that i absolutely would work on bypassing them if someone paid me.

 

[Mexican Molotov Marauder]

It truly is difficult to be me in this modern age. Every single day something happens that elicits the same Norm Macdonald quote from me, you know which one.

 

[The Incredible Gassy]

Anyone that supports this is less than a slave and forfeits their human rights and dignity.