I really thought this might change over time given strong desire for useful attestation by major actors like banks and media companies, but apparently they cannot exert the same level of influence on the PC industry as they have on the mobile industry.
Secure boot with software attestation could also be used for good.
There should be a physical button inside the case labeled "set up secure boot"
The vast, vast majority of skilled FPS players will predict their shots and shoot where they think the enemy player will be relative to the known hit detection of the game. In high level play for something like r6 siege, I’d say it’s 99% shooting before you can possibly know where they are by “feeling”
The reason cheating is a problem at all is that instead of playing with friends, you use online matchmaking to play with equally alienated online strangers. This causes issues well in excess of cheating, including paranoia over cheating.
To you. I’m perfectly happy to run a kernel level anticheay - I’m already running their code on my machine, and it can delete my files, upload them as encrypted game traffic, steal my crypto keys, screenshot my bank details and private photos all without running at a kernel level.
> trying to solve a social problem with technology
I disagree. I’m normally on the side of not doing that but increasing the player pool and giving players access to more people at the their own skill level is a good thing
The thing about gaming is that it’s not acceptable to leave 5% performance on the table whereas for other uses it usually is.
> And I do want a high end PC for other use cases.,
Right, you don't want two devices (that's fair). How can you _possibly_ trust the locked down device won't interfere with the other open software it's installed side by side with?
Also you can plug a mouse in a console… that's a weird excuse.
I think that’s an incredibly rare stance not held by the vast majority of gamers, including competitive ones.
That would mean those who are concerned about the integrity would want to sandbox everything else instead. And even if people are ok with giving up a small bit of perf when gaming, I’m sure they’re even more happy to give up perf when doing online banking.
The security of PCs is still poor. Even if you had every available security feature right now it's not enough for the game to be safe. We still need to wait for PCs to catch up with the state of the art, then we have to wait 5+ years for devices to make it into the wild to have a big enough market share to make targeting them to be commercially viable.
That’s not true at all in the field of cybersecurity in general, and I have doubts that it’s true in the subset of the field that has to do with anticheat.
If you got RCE in the game itself, it's effectively game over for any data you have on the computer.
Hot take: It's also totally unnecessary. The entire arms race is stupid.
Proper anti-cheat needs to be 0% invasive to be effective; server-side analysis plus client-side with no special privileges.
The problem is laziness, lack of creativity and greed. Most publishers want to push games out the door as fast as possible, so they treat anti-cheat as a low-budget afterthought. That usually means reaching for generic solutions that are relatively easy to implement because they try to be as turn-key as possible.
This reductionist "Oh no! We have to lock down their access to video output and raw input! Therefore, no VMs or Linux for anyone!" is idiotic. Especially when it flies in the face of Valve's prevailing trend towards Linux as a proper gaming platform.
There's so many local-only, privacy-preserving anti-cheat approaches that can be done with both software and dirt cheap hardware peripherals. Of course, if anyone ever figures that out, publishers will probably twist it towards invasive harvesting of data.
I'd love to be playing Marathon right now, but Bungie just wholesale doesn't support Linux nor VMs. Cool. That's $40 they won't get from me, multiply by about 5-10x for my friends. Add in the negative reviews that are preventing the game's Steam rating from reaching Overwhelmingly Positive and the damage to sales is significant.
People always freak out when I mention secure boot, and the funniest response usually are the ones who threaten to abandon Windows for macOS (which has had secure boot for more than a decade by default)
I'm not super technically knowledgeable about secure boot, but as far as I understand, you need to have a kernel signed by a trusted CA, which sucks if you want to compile your own, but is a hurdle generally managed by your distro, if you're willing to use their kernel.
But if all else fails you can always disable secure boot.