Kernel anticheat is a virus. There are zero reasons a video fame should have full access of your system.

Anti-cheat should be server side. Cheats are done on external hardware now as kernel AC chased them into the undetectable zone, well played.

No game is worth sacrificing your entire PC to play.

We're really going to kill this planet running algorithms against algorithms and it's the stupidest way to go.

Thank you for the list of games to avoid.

To understand why the requirements keep escalating, follow the arms race. Cheats started in user space, so anti-cheat moved into the kernel to see them. Cheats followed into the kernel, and then below it into hypervisors - so anti-cheat added hypervisor detection and began demanding a verified boot chain. Every time the cheat drops a layer deeper, the anti-cheat has to demand more privilege and more hardware trust to keep watching. That is what TPM 2.0, Secure Boot, remote attestation, IOMMU enforcement, and now forced firmware updates actually are: anti-cheat chasing cheats further down the stack.

Source

---

Wonderful day!

I've been into the subject a few times already, and just in case, if interested, in short, the TPM is a specific module with its own API in modern motherboards that has inside a key pair known as Endorsement Key (EK) which is a permanent unique identifier burned into the hardware. It's used to create signed EK certificates.

To clarify, similar to the asynchronous cryptographic we may see in the general TLS certificates in HTTP traffic ( "green" lock), the TPM , as mentioned, has API to create public keys from its private key inside.

The private key is burned-in by the manufacturer inside the module, which is also normally protected from physical damage to be self-destruct, by its standard requirements.

Systems like Denuvo may create and encrypt their own data using the public key, and send it to the TPM to decrypt, verify, and therefore identify the hardware on their servers as an identity.

The Endorsement Key (EK) is an asymmetric key pair consisting of a public and private key stored in a Shielded Location on the TPM.
The public part of the EK can be read from the TPM while the private part MUST never be exposed.
The public key of the EK is included in the EK certificate...
However, the EK provided by the manufacturer MUST be defined as a non-duplicable key.

Source: Credential_Profile_EK_V2.0_R14_published.pdf

Though, I believe, the TPM specifications were actually designed by Trusted Computing Group with privacy in mind to prevent the EK from being used as a "global tracking ID", some vendors or organizations may use it for undefined reason, and hence please do consider the opportunities your operating system and motherboard provide.

Also, if interested in experimenting, and haven't yet, in Linux, TPM is accessed via character devices (created by the Kernel module), and normally support different operations to read/write to, and located at /dev/tpm*, though these devices' permissions are set to root only in all the Kernels I've seen yet. There are CLI software packages as tpm2-tools for the protocol.

I don’t understand why games don’t just boot off an image if they need kernel access. Just provide and boot up their own kernel and isolate their spyware.

Allow private servers so you can control who plays.

I have a good middle ground: no monetary gain = no kernel level anticheat. Tournaments with monetary gain = kernel level anticheat. Pretty neat right?

Lemmy community loves to suggest server side anti-cheat as the solution but I have yet to hear 1 pvp game that has it implemented properly. What's more insane is someone unironically suggested Cs 2 as an example. Absurdly disconnected from reality.

Edit: I'm not supporting kernel lvl anti cheats. I'm merely pointing out how this community has somehow "solved" the problem and the developers are just too dumb to figure it out.

More enshittification, pvp gaming is going in a direction I won't go. Maybe if I had a dedicated computer for it, but there are no games that are worth it to me right now.

Absolutely! It‘s completely insane already but apparently you can still get around it sometimes by starting the game offline, then going online once you‘re inside and play online matches like normal without anti-cheat. Like, all these risks they burden their customers with just to be sloppy with the execution and rendering it useless. That‘s not malpractice anymore that‘s malicious.