Interesting about using a least permissions approach. My knowledge on the technicalities of cheating is limited, but what about detecting cheats injected into protected memory?
We have the driver do as little work as possible. If an anti-cheat check can be run unprivileged then we will run it that way. Sometimes there may not be a way to perform an integrity check without extra permissions and only in those cases is the work done by the driver.
Will you consider implementing an option to NOT run the driver at system startup by default, and prompt for a restart upon launching the game? I would feel much more comfortable compartmentalizing my play sessions in such a way that the driver is never running unless I am playing the game.
While it's not an official option you can do this yourself by uninstalling Vanguard once you're finished playing. You can find it as "Riot Vanguard" in Add/Remove programs.
When you want to play again the patcher/launcher will reinstall Vanguard automatically and you'll be asked to reboot your system.
"The Vanguard driver does not collect or send any information about your computer back to us."
"it doesn't scan anything (unless the game is running)"
Thank you for the clarification, this is mainly what I was looking for.
You're welcome! While there're details and specifics that I won't get into I'm trying to be as open as possible about what we're doing to fight cheaters.
Yeah that's not going to fly with me. I'll figure out some way to keep it off permanently until I launch the game. Otherwise some coder will find a way to do so.
Sorry to hear that. You can uninstall Riot Vanguard at any time from Add/Remove programs. You'll need to reinstall it and restart your computer if you want to play (the game patcher will reinstall it for you).
Wait so is it bad if I browsed a cheating forum a couple times? I have never cheated even in csgo but I keep checking 1 site to see if they have already come up with cheats
Our anti-cheat system does not run any scans while the game is closed and we definitely don't record your browsing behaviors even when the game is running.
Folks also quickly got some cheats running because e.g. their fog of war system is currently disabled in beta due to issues etc. Lets hope they get it sorted on full release.
This isn't true, the Fog of War system is running
Edit: you're right that we have more security improvements and anti-cheat tech in the works, just wanted to say that Fog of War is doing its thing on the server
Yeah, just find "C:\Program Files\Riot Vanguard" and change "vgk.sys" to "vgk1.sys" or any other name, then restart your PC. You'll have to rename it back and reboot again when you want to play Valorant.
You can also remove Vanguard (including vgk.sys) by going to Add/Remove programs and uninstalling "Riot Vanguard"
TL;DR Yes we run a driver at system startup, it doesn't scan anything (unless the game is running), it's designed to take up as few system resources as possible and it doesn't communicate to our servers. You can remove it at anytime.
Vanguard contains a driver component called vgk.sys (similar to other anti-cheat systems), it's the reason why a reboot is required after installing. Vanguard doesn't consider the computer trusted unless the Vanguard driver is loaded at system startup (this part is less common for anti-cheat systems).
This is good for stopping cheaters because a common way to bypass anti-cheat systems is to load cheats before the anti-cheat system starts and either modify system components to contain the cheat or to have the cheat tamper with the anti-cheat system as it loads. Running the driver at system startup time makes this significantly more difficult.
We've tried to be very careful with the security of the driver. We've h...
Read moreDid you guys think about a recap system for reported players like csgo with overwatch has?
Yeah, I'd like to build a system like this one day. It'll have to wait until we have our replay/demo system up and running.
If you suspect someone is cheating it's very helpful if you report them via the in game report system. If you have video clips or other details you would like to share please send them in via a support ticket.
You can also message me with the details but since I'm only one person and I sleep sometimes it's more effective to send in a support ticket so we can guarantee someone sees it.
Read moreHi, I'm sorry to resurrect a weeks-old discussion but I just wanted to suggest looking at requiring a passed-through graphics card and allowing in that case. Since League already does this there is precedent for it, and doing so would still completely cut off virtualized bot farms without a dedicated GPU per instance, which would quickly run out of space and skyrocket the cost of large-scale cheating.
If you'd like to see a counterargument for virtual machines, I wrote a more detailed post here about why I believe a blanket ban on all virtualization is not the right move here.
Anyway, I really hope you and your team reconsider this decision. I've been looking forward to the game since first announcement and I'll be quite disappointed...
Thanks for the suggestion but we're not planning on supporting VMs even with GPU pass-through right now.
We may change our stance in the future if the amount of disruption caused by the restriction becomes larger than the security gains but for now we don't have any plans to support virtual machines.
/u/RiotArkem check this out, it is a really nice quality of life improvement
Thanks, I'll make sure our designers have seen it!
Why you don't set up a page in your site where we can send/report cheats?
We're happy to receive information about cheat sites or cheating players via support ticket (https://support.riotgames.com) or for technical vulnerabilities via our bug bounty program at hackerone (or [email protected])
Any thoughts about pinglock or regionlock for a certain country where cheating is prevalent?
We can probably make something like this work if it becomes necessary (since we use ping to find the right servers for player to play on).
Hey, got a quick question about the AC.
You won't be able to get banned for let's say cheat engine when you aren't playing Valorant right?
Don't worry we won't ban accounts for things that happen when you're not playing Valorant
If we use ridiculously obtuse or unlikely difficult to detect methods like DMA (bypassing your DMA detection) that wouldn't count towards a bug bounty right? If we provide detection methods alongside bypasses that are insanely difficult to detect will those count towards a bug bounty? If so I've got a new hobby.
Sort of, we're happy to hear about stuff like this. However, we only pay rewards if we're able to make an improvement to the security of the game in response to the information provided.
That's definitely the right mindset to have and from what I've heard there's a lot of talented people on board with ya'll. Hopefully down the road you guys can get something similar to Overwatch or VACnet to tighten the mesh a bit on what people are able to get into the game.
On another note, is it possible that hack devs are taking notes from cheats developed for other Unreal based games? Any GoldSrc/Source based games have always had that issue and I've been hearing through the grapevine that there might be something to that in regards to Unreal.
Working with Unreal Engine does mean that cheat developers can use some of their experience reverse engineering other UE4 games to help them develop cheats faster. I don't think it will be a huge advantage for them in the long run but it does give them a head start.
This question comes pretty late for the thread, but are we how far off from having a pov demo system being included into the game ?
You can never really call aimbots until you see the demo (spinbots etc being the outlier)
A full replay/demo system is on our roadmap and we've been experimenting with some prototypes of it but I don't have an ETA.
Your fog of war system sounds really interesting in the abstract (not showing the client up to date information in order to obscure data from memory mining cheats). Have you run into any issues with it while developing it (especially regarding having to register hits from unseen opponents) and is this the first implimentation of similar tech in a competitive FPS ?
I've got a big article coming out next week about the development of the Fog of War system and some of the problems we ran into. Keep an eye out for it :)
I wouldn't say the Fog of War system is completely unique but I think VALORANT's implementation is more comprehensive than other game's implementations. There are also a lot of games that don't do anything like this either.
Did you already consider doing what valve did with "overwatch" in csgo? Reported players have their demos sent to ranked players and a unanimous decision bans the player.
I believe they also used it as machine learning (?) And people that shared similar mechanics as cheaters were sent to overwatch
Yes! I'd like to have an Overwatch system one day, I think it'll need to wait until after we build a general purpose replay system.
When building our aimbot detection AI research project we definitely were paying attention to how VACnet works. John McDonald from Valve talks about it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObhK8lUfIlc (it's a good watch if you're interested in this kind of thing)
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