Riot Games recently revealed a potentially ground-breaking new anti-cheat system, that will be implemented in League of Legends and their upcoming FPS, Project A. It will likely be used in any of their games where aimbot and other cheats are utilized. Now players can disable it when they’re not playing Riot’s 60 percent more wizard-y version of Counter-Strike, but it’s started to cause other issues. There’s anti-cheat.

by Jason Parker in General Feb, 5th 2020

Riot Games recently revealed a potentially ground-breaking new anti-cheat system, that will be implemented in League of Legends and their upcoming FPS, Project A. It will likely be used in any of their games where aimbot and other cheats are utilized.

I don’t think it will be such an issue for Legends of Runeterra. I have not heard of cheats for card games, but if they exist, I would not be shocked. Up until now, Riot has been doing battle with cheaters via their anti-cheat team. But something new is on the way, in the form of the kernel drive.

What’s the Kernel Drive?

A recent blog post came from Riot Games concerning this anti-cheat discussion: “Your favorite anti-cheat team has been forced to play this game [League] from the user-level, effectively giving cheaters a much-needed, twelve-stroke handicap. But as much as we might like the idea of an ever-escalating appsec war with teenagers, we’re now entering a multi-game universe where linear time and sleep deficits will make this particular strategy untenable.”

This new process/program is known as a kernel drive. The kernel is a computer program at the core of the PC’s operating system. It has complete control over everything. The highest form of protection overall is the kernel driver.

“In the last few years, cheat developers have started to leverage vulnerabilities or corrupt Windows’ signing verification to run their applications (or portions of them) at the kernel level,” Riot wrote. “The problem here arises from the fact that code executing in kernel-mode can hook the very system calls we would rely on to retrieve our data, modifying the results to appear legitimate in a way we might have difficulty detecting.”

Presently, these cheats run at a higher level of privilege on your PCs than Riot’s anti-cheat, but it sounds like that’s about to change. Certain styles of hardware are used to read and process the PC’s memory and can be completely undetectable. So that’s how those Ezreal’s never missed a shot.

Granted, every skilled player isn’t a cheater, but there are more than enough of them out there. To counter these cheaters, Riot’s going to start taking advantage of a kernel driver in the future. This should prevent those cheaters from being so sneaky and sly.

Riot Games Senior Anti Cheat People How Much They Make Stuff

A Positive Change

This will follow several other anti-cheat programs already on the market, like Easy Anti-Cheat, BattlEye and XIGNCODE3. Riot’s finally going to catch up with these other programs.

“The purpose of this upgrade is to monitor system state for integrity (so we can trust our data) and to make it harder for cheaters to tamper with our games (so you can’t blame aimbots for personal failure),” Riot wrote. “It will be significantly harder to create undetected cheats: protecting you from aimbots, protecting us from Reddit and protecting cheaters from themselves.”

Now, will this stop people from cheating? Of course not. These people are pretty convinced that they can’t be stopped and won’t be detected. That they “fly under the radar.” Or they’ll get a new account and start fresh because they’re just so good.

Riot Games Senior Anti Cheat People How Much They Make You

In my opinion, people using cheating hardware/software ought to be IP banned. Not given a temporary ban, not simply having an account ban. You must show people that harm the integrity of a competitive game that you aren’t going to take their nonsense. If it drives away people, that’s just the way of it.

Riot Games Senior Anti Cheat People How Much They Make Fun

Your average player isn’t going to be afraid of anti-cheat software, because they aren’t cheating. It’s not going to suddenly flag someone who is doing nothing wrong, I’m sure. But that’s the fear of people, that they’ll lose their account even though they did nothing wrong.

Riot Games Senior Anti Cheat People How Much They Make Money

But I don’t think that’s going to happen. It’s going to be good for their games hypothetically. If other anti-cheat programs have been doing this for years, I can’t help but wonder what took Riot Games so long to catch up. Sure, these programs aren’t 100% foolproof. But if it helps even a bit, it’s worth it.