EA's Anticheat will screw over Steam Deck gamers... 

My first thought is why buy an EA game...

Anti-cheat that needs to break security features like breaching the userland kernel separation of powers to work are malware and their respective companies should face legal action for creating and distributing said malware.

People need to just stop purchasing EA games all together. If they can't sell their games then they will have to change their business practices.

The irony is that kernel level access is not needed for some of the most undetectable aimbots: namely ones that use a secondary computer to look over your shoulder and help your mouse onto target.

Brings back memories of Safedisc and Securom messing up my system. The optical disks have gone but the hackery remains.

Unfortunately, sandboxing the anti-cheat completely defeats the purpose of the anti-cheat. The whole point is to have your fingers in all the pies to check for cheats and EA won't accept anything less. (There's a similar issue for streaming services. Some refuse to run on linux, with others their drm is broken and doesnt prevent screen recording. it's the justification that EA will use to demand true kernal level access.)

So the takeaway is to avoid EA. What a ground breaking and shocking development! :o

Seeing a game with "Incorporates 3rd-party DRM: EA on-line..." usually makes me very reluctant to get that game. Sometimes I wish I could filter out such games from the steam store. I can filter out "Card Game", why not 3rd party drm games as well?

A full virtualization is not possible for 1 simple reason: AMD and NVidia refuse to allow SR-IOV on their gaming cards, they most likely have a financial motive for this, it is known that the gaming cards do have the hardware to support it, it just is locked. Ironically Intel its card does allow for SR-IOV but with some caveats. SR-IOV is a way to share the graphics card between systems, real or virtual. Currently you can't share the graphics card between a Linux host and a virtual system so the graphics system would still have to run natively on your host. But I could see it being possible that there are bridges between the Proton-system and the host allowing for bidirectional grapihcs data while the keyboard and mouse inputs are being picked up by the virtual system.

EA makes anti-steam ware.

The whole kernel level issue of software for games and other like is a very hard no. Why? Because we have seen and learned this in the past... For those of us who remember StarForce and their rightful death that they deserved. Today, the games that used it HAVE to be run with a crack, as even Windows have that black listed and you can't install or use those games today on a Windows 10 system.

I would like to argue that device level anti-cheat should be a non-starter on its own, not just kernel level. Is disturbingly easy to bypass anti-chain solutions when they are relying on local hardware these systems need to be done server side and not on local hardware.

That kernel mode windows sandbox IS possible.. but man.... thats a super tall order... thats poking a hornets nest. Valve would need to invest in a 3rd party bigger than all the current Linux 3rd party groups they pay/invest in to make gaming on linux better. Probably triple if not quadruple the investment amount. Because you said it starts creeping into the containerization and virtualization realm. And man, lemme tell you as someone in that world, nothing is cheap

Very pertinent! And worrying.

In theory, it could be possible to create a sandbox for anticheats. Have you heard about ndiswrapper? Is an wrapper that allows to use some windows drivers on linux (it was particularly useful back then when many wifi adapters didn't had support on linux) and as you know, drivers is something that operates at kernel level. But, unfortunately I don't think EA would accept something like that. If a wrapper like that was developed, I'm pretty sure EA would do its best to try to detect it and block it.

I think it was in 5.11 or 5.13 "System Called" was added to the Linux kernel. It sends DRM (windows) that goes to Kernel back to WINE in Linux. Then back to kernel after translating it. It makes games work again.

IIRC, the PE convertion of Wine was made to make games that use certain types of anti-cheat and DRM easier to run. And, as mentioned by others, here is Syscall User Dispatch, that can be used to send certain syscalls back to userspace. But that does not see to be done yet..? Or it may be that many are Thunked..?

Your idea sounds like a lot of extra overhead to process but, we can already do this. Create a VM, pass through your GPU and install windows. The best way to have a mock kernel is to just have a kernel because it'll take years to write an open source version though, we might be able to liberate code from ReactOS for the kernel

5:45 this is actually only possible at all using a hypervisor, as in virtualization. But I think the much bigger issue would be anti-cheat companies actively blocking that implementation, since it wouldn't ever be able to be perfect, and would always be detectable.

Is linux is possible to create a anti-chet using ebpf, running in a sandbox in the kernel, but is very limited so unlikely that can run the same kernel module of windows

You can't virtualize a Windows kernel without Microsoft's consent unless you reverse engineer it. The Windows kernel is not open source.

Cleanroom FOSS NT Kernel substitute in WINE/Proton? You mean like ReactOS?

Yeah at this point I've given up on EA. They're stuff broke so many times already i just don't want to go through that all the time. If i can't rely on their games to run reliably, i'd rather not buy them again

5:07 “fair” is a place where animals and vegetables are judged.

Wait you can get ea play to work I've tried on heroic and lutris and all I get is a blue screen.

If only the Steam Deck had secure-boot :/ Cant play FIFA on it anyways.

Honestly anti-cheat just needs to be half-way decent AI regularly scanning for weird patterns of behavior. This would be sufficient for probably 95% of cheating in games. The idea they have to have full control of your system for this is utterly ludicrous. This is mostly a backdoor to creating more crazy DRM schemes to try to force as many people as possible into GaaS models. Yes, it's a bit conspiratorial on my part to think that, but it's hardly a deep conspiracy. It doesn't take many players to enact or think this way at all.

Proton cgroups and selinux would be an effective measure against malware and cheat software running in your games.... however proper selinux configuration might be too much for a mere AAA games publisher...

I could see some people even using a virtual kernel for that purpose on Windows.

So, in order to comply with these, the best would be to have multiple OS/kernels. Have multiple disks (I don't remember if you can do encryption like LUKS per logical partition, that would be great) and have dedicated ones for "special" games like this. And make an OS that has the keys /access only to that disk/partition (ideally, if you can detach the other disks, it would be the safest, but also quite the hassle) and that has NOTHING else installed, other than the game you want to play. Basically creating a game box/OS. So, if this is "infected" they can't do much else, it's only a base computer with a base OS with only the game and the launcher. Telemetry/spyware-wise, they can't steal much more than they do already. And exploiting this by a hacker would be quite hard. I kind of had something like this in mind anyway, to try with Gentoo, but for performance reasons. Have the game itself be the "init", so basically nothing else runs. Whenever you want something else, reboot into the normal OS, or into the work OS (where there's no games, the GPU is disabled and you only run on the integrated GPU, so the battery lasts longer etc)

I'm one of those that EA has so many strikes against them that they better have something truly impressive before I would even consider them, but in general, I'll stop playing any game that starts wanting kernel access. That actually drove me away from Genshin Impact in particular. As far as the virtualization goes, I figure that a Proton "fake kernel" may be the type of thing that an anticheat may be intended to catch, as that may also be used to inject cheats into a game. I am hoping, though, that the Deck gives Steam and Linux enough traction before long to make them a viable platform to target, much like Windows, Xbox, Playstation, or Ningendo.

Me personally I don't buy games from companies that have even their own launcher! It's a headache I just can't press the game I want to play I have to go through launchers that could take a while. Even if I'm on Windows I still have to wait a few minutes to play these games..

It just sounds like EA Vanguard

In reply to if EA has done anything to support Linux... I'd like to know the last time EA did anything for gamers.

So, why would they turn this on for something like Titanfall 2 when they sold it through Steam?

Proton itself wouldn't be able to run a sandboxed Window's kernel since it is not emulating the windows kernel but translating API calls. You would need to actually emulate or virtualize windows to pull that off. You could potentially try to run a virtualization layer with ReactOS if you want to stay open source but you would most likely get much worse performance than proton. So basically, this problem isn't going to be solved anytime soon if ever.

Valve has partly solved this problem by allowing for system call redirects. So when a program directly makes a system call, it can be redirected back into userspace code. This allows Valve to emulate kernel level anti-cheat. Now, of course, the problem is mocking up something that responds like whatever kernel driver it is they've installed. It might be possible to pretend to be a kernel environment though for that thing. Then the userspace intercept could transform this into a message to the program running in the simulated kernel environment. This is a lot of work, but is likely doable in a reasonably generic fashion. I believe the Windows kernel's internal mechanisms for handling drivers is fairly standardized.

I think the US government should require by law, all game publishers that use Colonel anti-cheat should always tag their games with Colonel level anti-cheat so that way before they install it, everybody knows that it has colonel anti-cheat so that way, if nobody wants people looking through their files through the internet.

Ah anti-cheat, the bane of Linux gamers everywhere.

Microsoft really need to stop programs doing stuff with the Kernel, a security nightmare.

any sort of anti cheat should run server side not put it on the users system into kernel to spy and use resources on. I think it would be interesting to see to put video game into docker container which would allow it to run on any operating system.

The virtualized kernel sounds like a good idea, perhaps in the past it wasnt worth it (sounds like an idea valve probably has explored/reviewed before)

Here's the part that EA needs to understand: they're not really screwing over us Steam Deck players, they're screwing themselves. There are a thousand other good (better) non-EA games to play, and we'll just buy and play those. We don't need them, they need us.

E. A. Evil, always. . .

Maybe Valve could invest in something like reactos to make this possible? I have no idea lol, would be cool though.

Well i thought ea games not supporting steam cloud and steam achievements was enough not to buy them, here's another reason

for me the solution is easy. You can split the cross play between people not running anticheat and people running anticheat. So people on linux could run the application but with lots of cheaters. Meanwhile they could implement a linux anticheat or just use VAC.

I hear you and 10000% agree.... but gamers are dumb and seem to just take what ever abuse AAA game companies wanna dish out to them. Hell I have people on the cyber security community still play valorant with vanguard... and they fully understand the risks

Most EA games I got free from psplus, so I just Chiaki it on my Deck 😅

I play fifa quite nicely on gamepass. Not ideal but….

How is a company that knowingly infects your computer with a rootkit not a violation of CFAA?

I am not worried since i don't buy EA games, i only have Star Wars: Fallen Order in my library.

"liking the smash button" since 1999

You should try to look at a different camera placement - not only you keep looking up, but also that chair in the background gets as much importance as your face haha

I don’t even want kernal level anti cheat on Windows anyway.

Which EA game is worth playing nowadays? Really curious what people is playing.

I guess you could get it to run on ReactOS... 😁

3:40 "any reasonable person... should refuse to have this kind of driver or application on your system" Well, looking at the millions of gamers that have Genshin impact and any game by Riot installed on their systems. Clearly gamers on the whole are either not reasonable, technologically illiterate. Or both.

They cannot even make their launcher work, sims4 is literally unplayable (bluescreens on windows and the launcher not working on linux)

I don’t care for any EA games anymore. The owners seem to be on another level and definitely not gamers

its not just a disguise. someone who used to cheat in games in the past confirmed that using linux was an easier way to cheat. and no, its not hard to learn how to use linux just to cheat, using some anti cheat solutions is way harder.

i can go without EA

Hella Cool lol Gardiner 'Cartman' Bryant

Just want to play a football game led in bed on my deck :(

proprietary ware's should be considered malware; period. Hope you have a great day & Safe Travels!

xbox and playstation has proven that virtualization WORKS! meaning its possible for valve to do the exact same thing!

Well from my take on it for a virtualized proton it would be good because minimize the risk of somebody going into the colonel and changing something amateurs well we are executing the game but I think it's also a problem with some of the anti-cheat games because you're not going to allow something they want to verify the data that will come through them so virtualization is not too good for at least games I have to do if auntie g but foremost the other I think that's a great idea

Guess i wont be buying any EA games any time soon 😢

Besides the fact that despite this is horrible invasive anticheat, it doesn't even STOP cheaters. Battlefield fans understand what I'm talking about.

I've been anti EA since Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle Earth 2. One of the GREATEST RTS games of all time, and absolutely thrown in the garbage by EA. Installing EA games is so invasive, and have been the root of so many OS wipes I've had to do (yes, I am weak, I also played the HELL out of Bad Company 2 in its day).

I liked that smash button as you asked.

It's simple. Don't buy EA games. They don't make anything good anyway.

I _think_ EA might have given Wine a bunch of game source code back in the 2000s, if that's not a false memory. That's before they became cartoon villains though. I had the same idea re: a containerised "Windows" kernel of some sort. Also have no idea if such a thing would be possible. Maybe they could license the Win 7 kernel or something? ;-)

They should have just bought Easy Anticheat. It already has their initials.

It’s malware by any measure, no matter what it’s ‘intention’. Basically Epic are saying ‘avoid our games’

*Mutahar has entered the chat*

thank god ea doesnt make any games worth playing

I didn't need another reason not to play EA games, but I'll add this to the pile. Their reputation has been caked in waste for so long; I haven't even paid attention to their announcements for years.

This is only a problem if you enjoy supporting EA. Luckily I'm not a part of that cult

Whelp no more EA games for me.

They could have solved this problem with anti-cheat a long time ago so that people would play their favorite games such as Cal of Duty and FIFA, especially since we pay for the game and we could add support, I really hope that they will do this in the near future

To be fair destiny's 2 anti-cheat is just as bad half the time I can't even stream to it because of it. A lot of steam games have this issue as well, either Linux needs to get with the program or convince programmers to support Linux or else windows will always be needed especially for multi-player games. And it's not just EA it's pretty much everyone but steam and even a lot of steam games don't work just for that reason.

ReactOS has entered the chat

They better not put this on their single player games!

Who likes to play ea games? Electronic arts was brilliant on the ps1.......been crap since then

If people really don't want anti-cheat, then you can make that trade for exclusively cloud-streaming your games. Pick your poison.

Ill just play ea games on console I guess lol

Can't we run the game in a container and have a Windows-kernel inside that while that all is completely isolated from the rest of our data and system. That would be an easy solution. Of course it would be best if gamers would just not buy those games but most Windows-gamers don't even know about this being a thing. :/

Well, I haven't bought any EA games in many many moons, because well... It's EA. So at least I am not hurt by this. Triple A studios are killing themselves.

Unfortunately, kernel anti-cheat is a necessary evil in today's landscape. It might not make sense to one that doesn't play a lot of competitive multiplayer games, but it's the only thing that's even moderately effective, and it still isn't that great, so you can only imagine how worse it would be otherwise. I 100% understand why people wouldn't want it, I hate it too, but until some miraculous innovation happens, it's sticking around. Obviously, it's also not needed for the overwhelming majority of games, but it definitely seems like EA wants to put it in everything exactly as a DRM scheme. I originally wrote like 2000 words for a direct example of why it's needed, but the significsntly oversimplified answer is this: It's a cat and mouse game of detection, and if cheats run at kernel level (and they do), then so does the anti-cheat. For people that seem confused, simply understand that non-kernel level anti-cheat would be like putting up a metal fence but only making the fence 1ft tall - anyone can just walk over it with ease. The privacy aspect is just one of trust. You're trusting that the company built to detect cheaters isn't spying on you, selling your data, etc. even though it has access to it, just as you're trusting Microsoft isn't doing the same with Windows....oh wait. My point here being that it is a bit hypocritical or at least naïve to say that anti-cheat companies are inherently less trustworthy than known spyware companies. As for the "trust but verify" aspect, unfortunately, anti-cheat is currently the one avenue where being open-source is actually a bad idea, because you're basically telegraphing every single upcoming change in advance of when it happens. Imagine if a police investigation put a loudspeaker outside a suspects home and yelled "we put a wiretap on your home", "we're trying to obtain a warrant to search your home!". Doesn't exactly work well, does it? And so in summary, I just say again that I absolutely hate it, but it's a necessary evil in games where cheating is legitimately needed, but it's relationship is built on a basis of trust, and it's up to the individual if they trust them enough to use it.

EA 🖕

I'm still salty about sony's rootkit scandal in early 2000's - I certainly don't think we should be agreeing to kernel access.

Let me make you a simple question: Why the hell are you or anyone playing EA games? they are the most generic, buggy and greedy games you can get

Easy solution - get ROG Ally - no problems there.

Thats why i sold my deck my windows asus ally runs games just great

first

There is other solution, I know you will not like it, but maybe native support for Windows, and changing OS for Windows on Steam Deck... all problems solved for gamers.

Ea sucks anyway, with very few acceptions