EA AntiCheat could spell trouble for Steam Deck / Linux

To me EA died a longtime ago.

The latest game I own published by them is the first Dragon Age.

I like their old games better. So this doesn't affect me minimally.

I was laughed at when I commented on YT that I would not let any game near my kernel. And now we have our first exploit.

Linux is a good filter. It makes Linux even more secure compared to Windows. As it just won't run.

Quoting: WorMzy

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What a nice piece of software! I would love a libadwaita version of it 🤣

(I was thinking, I never saw a progress bar on it)

Quoting: fagnerln

Quoting: WorMzy

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What a nice piece of software! I would love a libadwaita version of it 🤣

(I was thinking, I never saw a progress bar on it)

And for on the go, a mobile app would be nice too!

With how popular these kernel level rootkits are getting with publishers, and even in single player games lately, this is another reason I feel we need to support and encourage native development where they can't rely on this crap rather than just assume Proton is good enough and will magic away any need for such. Trends like this will probably be the most damaging to gaming on Linux.

Ugh!

With all the downsides of having a kernel level root kit there is also the added problem of that this doesn't really solve anything, there will be next day / same day cheats sold that will completely bypass this "anti cheat". It's a problem that cannot be avoided by the current direction the industry is taking.

There have been talks before on threads like this that server side AI might be the better option and that is probably true, even though that would of course require quite hefty resources server side to be able to analyze every single match, on the other hand there is no reason why every single match/session have to be monitored at all times either.

Now I have zero experience in writing games, especially online networked games, but I started to think about this a bit when this news announcement. If I'm understanding the main problem is that the server have to give the client data on opponents locations and so forth since network latency is too long for the server to do this in real realtime 60/120fps.

So what if you simply made the game server send out fake data mingled with the real data, with no marking so that neither the game nor any cheat/mod would be able to distinguish which of the data is real and which one is fake, just that the server would remove or move the position of the fake data before the client would be able to render it. This way the server could notice if the client was reacting to the fake data which only a cheat/mod would do.

Quoting: Pengling

Quoting: KimyrielleParticularly not when said band-aid solutions behave just like malware....

Perhaps it's just me, but in my books they meet the exact definition of it. It's like nobody learned from the music industry's Windows rootkit nonsense 20-odd years ago, or something.

They learned that Sony's still rich.

Was good while it lasted EA, if you are moving into security at the kernel level then I guess you do not like the kernel options that Linux brings. One option Valve could have is making the Steam Deck run on a custom kernel that is Locked on the Deck. But it would not win any fans from the open source community and I do not see it happening.

Quote from EA,

“PC cheat developers have increasingly moved into the kernel, so we need to have kernel-mode protections to ensure fair play and tackle PC cheat developers on an even playing field,” explains Elise Murphy, senior director of game security and anti-cheat at EA. “As tech-inclined video gamers ourselves, it is important to us to make sure that any kernel anti-cheat included in our games acts with a strong focus on the privacy and security of our gamers that use a PC.”

https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/13/23351900/ea-kernel-level-anti-cheat-system-fifa-23


Last edited by Craggles086 on 14 September 2022 at 3:44 am UTC

I sure hope they don't retroactively add this junk to Rolo to the Rescue, but considering EA's track record of being one of humanity's worst enemies, I'm sure they will.