Secure Boot, TPM and Anti-Cheat Engines
Secure Boot, TPM and Anti-Cheat Engines
andrewmoore.ca
Secure Boot, TPM and Anti-Cheat Engines
Anti-cheat engines are now requiring users to have Secure Boot and a fTPM enabled in order to play online multiplayer games. Will this decrease the amount of cheating, or is it a futile attempt at curbing an ever-growing problem?
“The use of a TPM enables anti-cheat providers to uniquely identify the cheater’s hardware in a verifiable way.”
How is this not a major privacy issue?
I also wonder why it would even be necessary for the cheats to run on the system the person is cheating on.
How else should it run? I can't imagine a scenario other than some hardware cheats like a scope overlay for an unscoped weapon or macro keyboard/mouse, but maybe there's something I'm missing?
It's been a solved problem for a while now. High end cheating systems run in a way that's 100% transparent to the primary computer. A second computer is used to either MITM the network traffic, or else it uses a PCIe card to grab the systems memory. From there keyboard and mouse inputs are first sent to the cheat system then relayed via USB to the primary. Video output is composited using a video mixer to draw overlays on the monitor. It's expensive to set up, but there's almost nothing that anti-cheat can do about it.
I’d imagine you could do some sort of mitm on the video, network, or memory and use that data to cheat. Or, if nothing else, a camera with software to detect targets that connects to hardware connected to a mouse that causes the mouse pointer to quickly move to the target. Most of this is potentially pretty cheap in the age of raspberry pi. I’m not sure if anyone’s doing it, but I’m sure someone will find a way if software anticheat becomes strong enough.