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Steam games will now need to fully disclose kernel-level anti-cheat on store pages (www.gamingonlinux.com)

submitted 13 hours ago by ampersandrew@lemmy.world to c/games@lemmy.world

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Now if only they could more clearly communicate when games are playable offline.

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[-] ArchRecord@lemm.ee 80 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

To put it very simply, the 'kernel' has significant control over your OS as it essentially runs above everything else in terms of system privileges.

It can (but not always) run at startup, so this means if you install a game with kernel-level anticheat, the moment your system turns on, the game's publisher can have software running on your system that can restrict the installation of a particular driver, stop certain software from running, or, even insidiously spy on your system's activity if they wished to. (and reverse-engineering the code to figure out if they are spying on you is a felony because of DRM-related laws)

It basically means trusting every single game publisher with kernel-level anticheat in their games to have a full view into your system, and the ability to effectively control it, without any legal recourse or transparency, all to try (and usually fail) to stop cheating in games.

[-] barlescharkley@lemmy.world 47 points 10 hours ago

More importantly, if traditional anticheat has a bug, your game dies. Oh no.

If kernel level anticheat has a bug, your computer blue screens (that's specifically what the blue screen is: a bug in the kernel, not just an ordinary bug that the system can recover from). Much worse. Sure hope that bug only crashes your computer when the game is running and not just whenever, because remember a kernel-level program can be running the moment your computer boots as above poster said

[-] ampersandrew@lemmy.world 48 points 11 hours ago

And it's worth noting that trusting the game developer isn't really enough. Far too many of them have been hacked, so who's to say it's always your favorite game developer behind the wheel?

[-] sp3tr4l@lemmy.zip 9 points 7 hours ago

Or, even better, when you let a whole bunch of devs have acces to the kernel...

... sometimes they just accidentally fuck up and push a bad update, unintentionally.

This is how CrowdStrike managed to Y2K an absurd number of enterprise computers fairly recently.

Its also why its ... you know, generally bad practice to have your kernel just open to fucking whoever instead of having it be locked down and rigorously tested.

Funnily enough, MSFT now appears to be shifting toward offering much less direct access to its kernel to 3rd party software devs.