Redefining the Risks of Kernel-Level Anti-Cheat in Online Gaming

In Personal Computer (PC) gaming, cheating is not a recent phenomenon. Ever since PC gaming has existed, game hacking and cheating software have been around. If you have played online multiplayer games, you will need some defense against cheats to keep the game fair and square. If a game gets some amount of active player base, cheaters are unavoidable. If the developers do not try to do something about it, all law-abiding players will quit for another game where they do not have to keep losing to cheaters. Not only does cheating have the potential to affect other players from somewhere else globally, but it also presents a more significant challenge for the game publishers. This will subsequently contribute to lower game traffic for gaming businesses, thereby reducing their revenues. Some of these anti-cheat solutions require the user to install an application with kernel-level access to the client’s system. This has raised many privacy and security concerns among players. Some of these programs have also caused problems with the Windows Operating System that led to issues with the updates and led other applications, not to work or crash. The purpose of this paper is to highlight their shortcomings and to come up with a possible solution that is not intrusive.