Activision Unveils Ricochet Anti-cheat System for Call of Duty (venturebeat.com) 32
Activision unveiled its Ricochet anti-cheat system for Call of Duty games as it tries to attack a longstanding cheating problem that has frustrated a lot of players. From a report: The new system will get rid of players cheating in Call of Duty: Warzone later this year and it will debut with Call of Duty: Vanguard, the new premium game coming on multiple platforms on November 5. Activision, whose parent company Activision Blizzard has been sued for having an alleged toxic culture of its own, said in its announcement that cheating in Call of Duty is frustrating for players, developers, and the entire community. The anti-cheat team has made great strides in fighting this persistent issue that affects so many, but the company said it knows more must be done. Ricochet is supported by a team of dedicated professionals focused on fighting unfair play.
The Ricochet anti-cheat initiative is a multi-faceted approach to combat cheating, featuring new server-side tools which monitor analytics to identify cheating, enhanced investigation processes to stamp out cheaters, updates to strengthen account security, and more. Ricochet's backend anti-cheat security features will launch alongside Call of Duty: Vanguard, and later this year with the Pacific update coming to Call of Duty: Warzone. In addition to server enhancements coming with Ricochet is a new PC kernel-level driver, developed internally for the Call of Duty franchise, and launching first for Call of Duty: Warzone. This driver will assist in the identification of cheaters, reinforcing and strengthening the overall server security. The kernel-level driver launches alongside the Pacific update for Warzone later this year. Further reading: Cheat Maker Is Not Afraid of Call of Duty's New Kernel-Level Anti-Cheat.
The Ricochet anti-cheat initiative is a multi-faceted approach to combat cheating, featuring new server-side tools which monitor analytics to identify cheating, enhanced investigation processes to stamp out cheaters, updates to strengthen account security, and more. Ricochet's backend anti-cheat security features will launch alongside Call of Duty: Vanguard, and later this year with the Pacific update coming to Call of Duty: Warzone. In addition to server enhancements coming with Ricochet is a new PC kernel-level driver, developed internally for the Call of Duty franchise, and launching first for Call of Duty: Warzone. This driver will assist in the identification of cheaters, reinforcing and strengthening the overall server security. The kernel-level driver launches alongside the Pacific update for Warzone later this year. Further reading: Cheat Maker Is Not Afraid of Call of Duty's New Kernel-Level Anti-Cheat.
Good Luck (Score:2)
That is all.
That's a helluva footnote (Score:4, Insightful)
In addition to server enhancements coming with Ricochet is a new PC kernel-level driver, developed internally for the Call of Duty franchise, and launching first for Call of Duty: Warzone. This driver will assist in the identification of cheaters, reinforcing and strengthening the overall server security. The kernel-level driver launches alongside the Pacific update for Warzone later this year.
No thank you.
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Well, if you want to be big in any online game, you need to have a rootkit from whoever is refereeing the system. The real-money poker sites have had this for more than a decade.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Hey, that's the cost of being the #PCMasterRace now isn't it?
Anyhow, I don't see why it can't be an option. Choose to install the rootkit or not, it's your choice. Servers can decide to choose what clients they want to connect - those who installed the rootkit and those who don't.
If you want to do the campaign, don't install the rootkit. If you want to play with friends as a group, you don't need the rootkit either.
Let it be a choice, and that's why #PCMasterRace is supposed to be superior.
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The kernel level stuff is probably more to do with copy protection than with anti-cheat. Cheat software can't really hide on Windows anymore, they took care of that to prevent malware hiding from anti-virus software.
Modern cheaters often run the cheat software on another computer. It either screws with network packets (like your basic "lag switch") or some now use HDMI capture and image recognition, along with USB mouse emulation to auto-aim. The latter can be detected by looking for inhuman mouse movements
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I'm out (Score:4, Insightful)
I'll never install a game that requires a kernel-level driver. I actually use my PC for important stuff. And there's a very long history of malware making use of badly written kernel level DRM or anti-cheat drivers to get privileged access.
Besides, the only reliable way to detect cheating is server-side detection, since that's 100% under the dev's control. Anything client-side can be spoofed if the user is willing to work hard enough to hack it. It'll catch low-hanging fruit, but not those truly determined. It's good they're not completely relying on client-side code.
I'm guessing this also means there's little chance of these games working on Mac or Linux.
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I'll never install a game that requires a kernel-level driver. I actually use my PC for important stuff.
Or game and do "important stuff" on different systems.
The non-gaming system probably doesn't have to be as high-end either.
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Well, I make videogames for a living, so...
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Wont need to cheat (Score:2)
Seems good to me (Score:3)
I know many people are against the rootlet aspect of this, but if I were really into Call Of Duty I would prefer that *if* it actually makes a difference with the amount of cheating.
I would probably make sure I had a gaming PC where this was installed, and a PC (probably laptop) for other purposes as I wouldn't want the rootlet around a system I did other things with. But making a console PC is the price you pay for having an all around stable gaming experience.
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I played MW for maybe half a year before the cheaters and the developers teamed up to drive me away.
When I contacted infinity ward they insisted it was impossible to detect cheating from the client side, it had to be detected and controlled from the servers, ran by activision. This seemed to make sense.
So I contacted activisio
Never trust... (Score:1)
never trust the client
Although I've not written any commercial games (well one thing that barely qualifies as a game), I have written a lot of server side stuff and that was a fixed rule even for when you weren't expecting a lot of cheating, you just never know who is going to try and submit crazy data to a server or badly written clients.
Anyway I did wonder about the rootlet part of the cheat prevention, I guess that seems more secure but how much more is it really? Cannot it too be hacked?
It seems like t
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the point of the root kit is to "hide" from the cheat. (which may also be running root?)
If you know information about the app you're trying to avoid, you can take countermeasures to hide. But if the detection software is running a rootkit, then the results of the (kernel level) APIs that the cheat runs to gather information about the system can be manipulated.
One good eample is in benchmarking. Games have, on several occasions, been known to scan the system to see if benchmarking software is running - if
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Well first they sell you a product that's a fire hazard, and now they're giving away free fire extinguishers. Aren't they just doing great?
They created a problem, and now instead of fixing the problem, they're trying to limit the ongoing damage.
So no, I don't consider this the best solution. It's better than nothing, but it's far from being the most effective option available to them.
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I know many people are against the rootlet aspect of this, but if I were really into Call Of Duty I would prefer that *if* it actually makes a difference with the amount of cheating.
I would probably make sure I had a gaming PC where this was installed, and a PC (probably laptop) for other purposes as I wouldn't want the rootlet around a system I did other things with. But making a console PC is the price you pay for having an all around stable gaming experience.
And I bet that it won't make a difference to the amount of cheating. The cheaters will just find a way around it.
All manner of invasive technological solutions have been tried, the only solution that has a high rate of success are human moderators, which were fine when people ran their own servers but sucked when "rights holders" started to centralise everything.
The last COD I played was Modern Warfare (the first one back in the early 00's) and that was enough to make me swear off the series for life.
How does cheating work? (Score:2)
Does anyone here know? I can see why detecting cheating on the server would be difficult, but it seems like it should be almost trivial to frustrate cheats on the client side. Particularly in an age where regular, even daily, updates are normal.
I'd think it would be simple to change some things about the game (in the protocol, scripting, whatever) in minor ways that would make the game incompatible with cheats. I can even image several such changes planned ahead of time, or even automated in some way, a
Re:How does cheating work? (Score:5, Informative)
Game dev here. I can shed some light on this.
First off, how will you _verify_ that someone isn't running a custom GPU driver that draws everything in wireframe mode? This "Wall Hack" has been around for decades.
Second, positions for players are usually stored in C's float or double type. It is relatively easy to read memory from another process. Are you going to decrypt, do operations, and then encrypt them EVERY time they are accessed? Let's pretend you move them around in memory. With CheatEngine it is relatively easy to "trace pointers" and find the new locations.
Third, let's say you start to track accuracy and notice some players are _extremely_ accurate. How do you detect the difference between false positives and aim bots? Bots are NOT 100% accurate all the time as that is TOO noticeable. So they introduce tiny flaws to make them look more human. How much time, money, resources, etc. are you going to waste trying to solve this unsolvable problem of what is basically a stripped down Turing test?
Fourth, how do you detect a proxy server / man-in-the-middle attack where a client machine has no cheats running but a machine is logging and inspecting all network traffic and displaying the information on a second monitor to the cheater?
Fifth, servers usually send more information to the client to prevent "pop-up" and because doing occlusion testing in real-time can be expensive. For example, Players Alice and Bob are heading towards a corner. If you delay sending Bob's position to Alice until the last second Alice will have "pop-up" where Bob magically appears in front of them. If you have N players this is potentially an N^2 visibility problem. Yes, there are Spatial Partitioning algorithms to help with this but the more players you have and the more responsive you want the game to be the less Physics you need to do.
Sixth, how do you prevent "Spying" where someone on the other team is "leaking" information via an external voice chat?
> Could we delay updated cheats long enough for a new update to send them back to square one?
No.
You DON'T want to ban cheaters instantly. You want to collect data and then do "ban waves" so cheaters don't know what "triggered" the alarm.
> Is it lack of effort?
No. More like waste of time and money for devs when cheaters continue to pay big money in underground sites to develop custom cheats.
> Something more fundamental?
The problem is basically unsolvable. There are WAY more hackers then developers who are more determined to "beat the system".
Basically, cheat detection is a black hole of resources. i.e. Decreasing returns. You spend more and more money to catch less and less cheaters.
> Are they afraid of alienating the cheaters?
In some games that happens. It really depends on the game.
Also, what is prevent someone caught cheating just from buying the game again and making a new account?
Hope this helps.
Re: How does cheating work? (Score:2)
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> how about not drawing characters behind walls?
Like I said it is a balancing act of occlusion and pop-up. There is no magic formula to get this right given latency.
> For the mitm attack: just make a ssl connection to the server.
You honestly think that will stop someone who uses WireShark and packet sniffing? LOL.
> Also that shooting through the wall
You misread. It is not about shooting through the walls but drawing players behind the wall so you can anticipate their movement and pre-aim / pre-fi
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Btw, why should any process read the memory of any other process, this seems like an OS design failure to me.
if you connect the account to a phone number, you can sort of permanently ban them, as they will run out of phone numbers.
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Thanks for the effort. Yes, it does help. It would probably help more if I had some first-hand experience with modern games and what kinds of things people do to cheat. I still think "MUD" when someone talks about network multiplayer games, after all. The only modern cheats I've heard anything about are 'aim bots', if that helps explain where I'm coming from. You've certainly expanded my understanding of the scope of the problem in both the social and technical dimensions.
I understood the difficulty of
This was really Informative for a n00b! (Score:2)
This was really Informative for a n00b!
Similar to my war dialing in the olden days trying to match human inputs and variation but to the Nth ...
Re: How does cheating work? (Score:2)
That's all well and good but Call of Duty is notorious for bad anti-cheat leading to it being overrun with cheaters.
On the other hand, games on consoles such as PS4 and Xbox One are pretty clean (if you disable crossplay).
It's not about preventing every cheater, but at some point it becomes to hard to cheat that the average user gives up. This is how you harm the chest developers' business model.
And bans these days are by hardware ID as well so it's not enough for a cheater to buy the game again.
I wonder if this will be integrated into COD:MW (Score:1)
I know its sunsetting and that's bring even more cheaters out, but now on season 6, and i still play it every day, but the cheaters are getting worse now that newer games are here. Cold War, Warzone, Vanguard, and now with BF2042 on the horizon, and the lack of attention to the older but still incredibly popular mw is showing with the usual game breaking bugs (parties omg, how hard is it to keep 6 people in one spot), but anti-cheat would be fantastic.
That way and someway to detect/kick/ban lag switchers.
later this year (Score:1)
Console Only Option (Score:2)