

“Even at Riot, nobody wanted us to make a driver.

Working in the kernel is difficult-it’s more specialized and requires loads of quality assurance testing because the potential impact of bad code is so much more drastic-which leads to increased expense.
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Still, games studies were, and often remain, cautious about implementing their own driver solutions. Sign up for our Games newsletter and never miss our latest gaming tips, reviews, and features. Anti-cheat systems are heading to the kernel in part because that’s where the cheaters are. But the reality is that security engineers, especially those working to establish fairness in the hyper-competitive FPS genre, haven’t been given a lot of choice. It’s not surprising, then, that some people have reservations. And because of that sequestration, user-mode software has very limited visibility into what’s happening in the kernel.

While faulty code executed in user mode-“ring 3,” where web browsers, word processors, and the rest of the software we use lives-results in that specific software crashing, an error in the kernel brings down the whole system, usually in the ubiquitous Blue Screen of Death.
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Software in this region includes the operating system, the drivers that talk to hardware-like keyboards, mice, and the video card-as well as software that requires high-level permissions, like antivirus suites. The kernel itself-sometimes called “ring 0”-is a sequestered portion of a computer, where the core functionality of the machine runs. But an increasingly vocal subset of gamers is concerned that the software meant to detect and ban cheaters has become overly broad and invasive, posing a considerable threat to their privacy and system integrity.Īt issue are kernel-level drivers, a relatively new escalation against cheat makers. In the past decade, big competitive online games, especially first-person shooters like Activision-Blizzard’s Call of Duty and Bungie’s Destiny 2, have had to massively scale up their operations to combat the booming business of cheat sellers.
