In the vast world of online competitive gaming, it is necessary to guard the integrity of the gaming community. Cheaters have always managed to find a way to breach the security of online games by applying various methods, including DMA (Direct Memory Access), which is by far the cheapest and most effective cheating tool out there.
Valorant has a kernel-level anti-cheat system known as Vanguard. It is based on the principle of extracting data from your device to maintain a check on potential cheaters. Some people view Vanguard as a potential privacy threat, while others see it as a necessary tool required to maintain the integrity of games.
The war between Cheat makers and Anti-Cheat developers
There has been a significant threat cloud looming over the competitive gaming community in the recent past, mainly due to DMA and AI-based cheats. DMA cheats are the most extensively used method for breaching the security of a game, as they directly attack the memory location via any USB device, which remains undetected as a threat.
Nick Peterson, Principal Software Engineer of Anti-Cheat, and Phillip Koskinas, Director and Head of Anti-Cheat at Riot, talk about the methods they use for dealing with DMA threats. Paterson said:
DMA devices […] attempt to look like an innocent device such as a network card, USB host controller, sound card, you name it. […] The goal here is to get undetected reads on memory.
There’s a few different approaches studios could take to make DMA usage more difficult in online games. Ours at Riot is one we’ve been slowly rolling out for several years
They refrained from sharing further details about their anti-cheat methods, as maintaining the secrecy necessary to keep the anti-cheat effective is of utmost importance in the war between cheat makers and anti-cheat developers.
Anti – Cheat is a growing industry
Cheating in video games has evolved for the worse, from simple code hacks that run internally in an application or externally to hardware-threatening DMA cheats and AI-based cheats. Although Valorant’s Vanguard is a strong wall to breach, it has to balance data collection and user privacy without overstepping its boundaries.
Riot’s recent strategy against cheaters includes hardware-level security through the IOMMU requirement. Although this method has not been adopted across the industry, it can create a huge impact in the fight against cheaters. Phillip Koskinas shared his thoughts on IOMMU. He said:
The industry ain’t quite ready for this kind of thing yet.
IOMMU stands for Input-Output Memory Management Unit, It is a hardware technology that lets the operating system manage the memory access for input/output (I/O) devices. Valorant has allegedly caught hold of a lot of cheaters using the DMA route via this method. This is something that no one else in the industry is currently pursuing.
IOMMU restricts a device’s memory access abilities, preventing unauthorized access and memory manipulation by threat sources. IOMMU requirements, clubbed with anti-cheat software, can strongly handle hardware-based threats that exploit direct memory access.
