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this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2024
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Asklemmy
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Preface: I'm not an expert in this yet but I'm pretty interested in learning about systems-level topics so if I'm wrong please correct me!
Yes, the thing about anticheats and anti viruses is that they are only useful when they have access to the underlying resources that a virus or cheat engine might try to modify. In other words, if cheating software is going to use kernel-level access to modify the game, then an anticheat would also need kernel-level access to find that software. It very quickly became an arms race to the lowest level of your computer. It's the same with anti viruses.
IMO the better strategy would be to do verification on a server level, but that probably wouldn't be able to catch a lot of cheats like wall hacks or player outlines. At some point you just have to accept that some cheaters are going to get through and you'll have to rely on a user-reporting system to get cheaters because there will always be a way to get past the anticheats and installing a separate rootkit for each game isn't exactly a great idea.
Could they not hash the contents of the game's folders and send that back to the server to confirm it's not been tampered with?
So save files exist. Also custom user content. So the hash will change accordingly. Plus some cheats don't require a modification of game files anyway, they use memory analysis to get, say, the location of other player objects, then they manipulate local information to give the player an advantage. This is how aim hacks and wall hacks work.
Cheats are hard to prevent for the sole reason of you don't own the computer they could be running on. You can't trust the user or the machine, and have to design accordingly. This leads many to the "solution" that is kernel level anticheat, it gives total access to the system.