On: Steam Machine

[polski-g]

But isn't all client-side anti-cheat bypassable by doing image recognition on the rendered image? (either remote desktop or a hardware-based display cable proxy)

[Yokolos → polski-g]

Modern cheats are far more advanced than this. Using a DMA cheat, you basically just read the game's memory from a different computer and there's no way for the game to know unless the PCI device ID is known: https://intl.anticheatexpert.com/resource-center/content-68....

[bangaladore → Yokolos]

DMA is "easy" to patch. No reason to allow a device to have arbitrary memory access. Just require use of IOMMU.

FaceIT essentially has countered most modern cheats including those using DMA. https://www.faceit.com/en/news/faceit-rollout-of-tpm-secure-...

Nowadays if memory access is needed, you are looking at having to find a way to load a custom BIOS or UEFI module in a way that doesn't mess with secure boot. Even then, certain anti-cheats use frequently firing interrupts to find any unknown code executing on any system threads.

[bangaladore → polski-g]

Yes. Using another machine, record the screen & programmatically move mouse.

At that point you have to look at heuristics (assuming the input device is not trivially detectable vs a legit one).

However, that can obviously only be used for certain types of cheating (e.g. aimbot, trigger bot (shoot when crosshair is on person)).