I'm not finding any information online other than that it's difficult

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[–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

That’s why kernel anti-cheat is effective

Is it actually effective tho?

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    It doesn't stop cheating, it just makes cheating require spending a few hundred dollars and dealing with complex hardware setups. This means that relatively few people try.

    Non-kernel anti-cheat can be bypassed by software. So it's cheap and easily available.

    That's the only difference. Kernel anti-cheat doesn't prevent cheating, it just makes it more expensive.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Can't you just use a virtual machine?

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    That would let you hide things from the kernel anti-cheat but the AC can detect that it is running in a VM and just won't let you play.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    Is there really no such thing as a virtual machine that can't pretend to be real hardware?

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    The short answer is no.

    There's a lot of study on this topic from the cybersecurity perspective. If you could create an undetectable virtualization layer then it would be used for real-world cyberattacks to steal money and the existence would be quickly noticed by security researchers (and future hardware would include changes to mitigate the vulnerability). It wouldn't be used for creating aimbots for video games.

    If you want to read into the technical details, this stackoverflow thread has a lot of links to various papers and articles on the topic: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/39533/how-to-identify-that-youre-running-under-a-vm

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