What are DMA cheats, and how does it work?
Let's talk about making a cheat right now.
I need access to the game's memory, right? I need to read it because the game's memory tells me everything I need to know. It tells me where the enemies are, where I am. It gives me information I can use to draw enemies from my screen's two-dimensional perspective. If I shoot someone, their health will change. In the game's memory. The game's memory is everything.
Well, with DMA cheating, I put a DMA board into my computer running the game. The DMA board is just a hardware board that plugs into a PCIe slot on my motherboard. This board can read the game's memory in a way that is very hard to detect.
Now, to prevent the anti-cheat from detecting this board, I plugged it into my computer, I will flash firmware to the board that masks it as a legitimate PCIe device. I could maybe buy a WiFi adapter that is a PCIe board and reverse the firmware for that board and mimic it with my DMA board, E.G.
I then connect the cable to my DMA board and put that cable into another computer. This other computer is where my cheat software will run and use the game's memory that is reading from the board. I can then have a game memory base cheap, without anything changing in the memory of the game's computer. I could, e.g., draw a radar on my 2nd PC, or any device I want, showing my location and the enemy locations.
If I really wanted to get advanced, I could use what's called a future to show my ESP over the game on the monitor I'm using to play the game. User outputs your 2nd computer's display output over your 1st computer's display output, and then removes the color black. So I could draw my ESP with a black background on my 2nd computer and then put it over my game display and remove the black background. What remains is ESP overlaying my game without any detection vectors because the fusure mimics my monitor, four aimbot and triggerbot.
I can use a hardware device called a cam Box. This device mimics one mouse input, when in reality, my 2nd computer's cheat software is helping me control my mouse.
Could DMA cheats be detected with a proper anti-cheat? Bryt Vanguard has done OK against poor to medium-quality DMA firmware, particularly the mass sold options. DMA is very hard to stop entirely, but I think the best examples of anti-cheats in the world. We'll give DMA cheaters a bit of trouble. Long term call of duty is probably not going to do anything meaningful to stop DMA.
Do you think that DMA will be the future of cheating? And video games? DMA and computer vision? Cheats are the unstoppable future of cheating.
So we spoke about computer vision earlier. So what is computer vision, and how are cheat developers using it? Basically, you train an AI model to detect enemies in a video game, then you use some undetected method for capturing the screen and another undetected method for input so that you can automatically detect enemies on the screen and aim at them with recoil control. Triggerbot is also possible. Is computer vision being used on PC or console or on both? It's being used on both. It will get better as the underlying technology advances. Cheaters are not advancing computer vision technology. Larger companies, like car manufacturers, are funding and advancing computer vision for use cases such as self-driving cars. And cheaters are utilizing publicly available releases for the purposes of cheating.
One example is that you only look once model our DMA and computer vision being used now, and are they available for most cheap providers? DMA and computer vision are starting to become more widespread in the near future. They will both be rampant. I don't think competitive integrity will ever exist in gaming, but the goal should be to limit the cheating problem as much as possible.
What kind of anti-cheat would you need to detect computer vision? Any traditional anti-cheat would be fine, assuming the cheater is using only one device. If the computer vision cheat is running on the same computer as the game, the anti-cheat could just find it with the same methods it uses to find other types of running cheat software. Advanced computer vision setups that use novel methods for screen capture, novel methods for input, and run the AI model on a separate device, are, in my opinion, unable to be beaten by any type of anti-cheat.
How soon before cheats that use computer vision become mainstream? They are getting quite popular. They will be mainstream in the cheating space soon. The technology needs a bit more time to improve for certain games where enemies aren't as visually clear as they are in a game like CS2.
What an AI anti-cheat be the only effective detection method for computer vision and DMA? There are traditional anti-cheat measures that can be taken client-side against some DMA and computer vision cheaters. The DMA hardware is plugged into the computer running the game so the device can be scanned and tested by advanced anti-cheats. DMA devices with poor-quality firmware are easier to detect in terms of computer vision. The anti-cheat could look for methods of capturing the screen, influencing input, or the AI model itself if it's running on the same device as the game. The problems arise with advanced DMA firmware or advanced computer vision cheating methods. You could theoretically use hardware to capture your gameplay, hardware to influence your input and run the AI model on a separate device. Doing this would be nearly undetectable, just like DMA cheaters with proper firmware. And cheats that don't write to the game's memory are nearly undetectable. In these situations, cheating becomes a fact that gamers have to deal with. There is no magic server-side AI anti-cheat coming proper closet. Cheaters are indistinguishable from legitimate players, even when reviewed by AI.