Helldivers 2 - Egregious root level anti-cheat?

[pim69]

I was looking at buying this game, but saw a few concerning review comments on steam, so started digging into the nprotect anti-cheat software and see a lot of discussion about how excessive its permissions are. This software has root level system access when installed, and also continues running even after the game is shut down. I'm not big on supporting vendors who add potential vulnerabilities to my PC with an always-on software for cheat prevention in a PVE game that could itself become compromised, or other malware could use this software as a vulnerability to gain full system root access to your system. 

 

Since I saw Linus recommend this game, I thought I'd raise this topic here to see how others feel about this, if there is awareness, etc.

[OhYou_]

when the game launched and my friends were talking about It, I looked it up to see how much it was gonna cost and saw that anticheat stuff and was like nope not buying it

[OhioYJ]

Welcome to pretty much any game that uses anti-cheat. This is not a new thing if you play multiplayer games online.

[Nayr438]

nProtect has been around a long time and is considered mostly harmless, with that said it is essentially a rootkit that can monitor everything you do on your system and could be used for malicious purposes. This isn't limited to nProtect and this software running at Ring0 is becoming the norm across pretty much all AntiCheat software. So if you want to play Multiplayer games you should just get used to it. And before you think of spinning up a VM, a lot of these AntiCheats actively check to see if it's running in a VM and consider it a bannable offense.
If it's a big concern for you, which it should be, consider setting up a secondary windows instance on another drive for your Multiplayer games that you can reboot into or just don't play them.

[Shimejii]

I avoid all games that use that type of anti-cheat because it has been proven that they do not provide anything better then other anti-cheat. For the potential risk of having it vs any sort of benefit, i just dont play those games.

 

 

[elpiop]

It doesn't continue running after you exit the game. I don't really see it differently from any other anticheat like EAC or BattleEye

[Shimejii]

3 minutes ago, elpiop said:

It doesn't continue running after you exit the game. I don't really see it differently from any other anticheat like EAC or BattleEye

That is not true at all, that is not how some of those work Once installed they will ALWAYS be running. Valorants is always on, even when game isnt running as well as a few other ones that have that level of access .

[Agall]

1 minute ago, Shimejii said:

That is not true at all, that is not how some of those work Once installed they will ALWAYS be running. Valorants is always on, even when game isnt running as well as a few other ones that have that level of access .

Valorant is definitely a good one to stay away from with its anti-cheat. I'm unfamiliar with any other game with that level of anti-cheat.

[Kisai]

31 minutes ago, OhioYJ said:

Welcome to pretty much any game that uses anti-cheat. This is not a new thing if you play multiplayer games online.

These anti-cheats are also easily bypassed. Generic anti-cheat software is stopped dead in it's tracks by the same tools you use to trampoline cheats into programs.

 

There is a fine line between "cheat program detected hooked into the game" and "streaming/recording the game" both which hook into the game in different ways.

 

Ideally, we wouldn't need anti-cheat software, but that would again (As I said many many times) requiring the server to do a lot more work, and not trusting the input from the game client. 

 

The promise of "Streaming games" to players, is that it eliminates every form of cheating except for macro keyboards, but AI tech is undermining that. There is nothing wrong with letting the AI play the game as long as the AI plays the game by the same rules the human players do, and they never do, because the AI's are not trained with player data, they are trained by examining the game's memory.

 

Anyway, Helldivers 2 uses the Autodesk Stingray engine, and that's... something that I don't think many games use and has been discontinued for 6 years. So unless they want to switch to something else, they're probably going to be limited to how they can fix cheats.

 

 

[m1lk3y]

As far as I know, and can see, this anti-cheat doesn't continue running after you close the game. I don't know how to dig deep into active running system files, but the process in task manager goes away when I close the game.

[elpiop]

5 hours ago, Shimejii said:

That is not true at all, that is not how some of those work Once installed they will ALWAYS be running. Valorants is always on, even when game isnt running as well as a few other ones that have that level of access .

Arrowhead devs have stated that the anti-cheat is only active while the game is running. I'm pretty sure this is the case with EAC and BattleEye as well. Yeah, they add another attack vector that can be exploited.. but so does everything you install on your computer