These anticheat systems are not root kits, they do not attempt to conceal their presence from you nor attempt to prevent their removal.
Are they potential security and stability headaches? Yes, as with anything you load into your OS kernel. But rootkits they are not.
Valorant’s Vanguard sucks because the thing insists on running 24/7 and requires a reboot to disable or re-enable. During operation it causes a whole host of issues from blocking programs to causing BSODs - but it sits there in plain sight.
Denuvo anti-cheat’s major issue is for whatever godforsaken reason they decided to bypass ntdll to make some syscalls breaking WINE. Presumably they did this because ntdll can be hooked like anything else, but this speaks of poor design more than anything as the kernel-mode driver should be more than capable of detecting this.
Battleye is...fine. As is Easy Anti-Cheat.
Blizzard’s warden has been a privacy mess over the years with it scanning window titles and reporting them back. But AFAIK it does all of its work usermode.
I’m not a huge fan of the level of access modern anticheat packages have on my system - but with the widely open platform that is PC gaming it’s no surprise that gamers and developers alike want cheaters to be dealt with. Valorant can kiss my ass right now though, at least everything else has the decency to only run when I’m playing a game.
Are they potential security and stability headaches? Yes, as with anything you load into your OS kernel. But rootkits they are not.
Valorant’s Vanguard sucks because the thing insists on running 24/7 and requires a reboot to disable or re-enable. During operation it causes a whole host of issues from blocking programs to causing BSODs - but it sits there in plain sight.
Denuvo anti-cheat’s major issue is for whatever godforsaken reason they decided to bypass ntdll to make some syscalls breaking WINE. Presumably they did this because ntdll can be hooked like anything else, but this speaks of poor design more than anything as the kernel-mode driver should be more than capable of detecting this.
Battleye is...fine. As is Easy Anti-Cheat.
Blizzard’s warden has been a privacy mess over the years with it scanning window titles and reporting them back. But AFAIK it does all of its work usermode.
I’m not a huge fan of the level of access modern anticheat packages have on my system - but with the widely open platform that is PC gaming it’s no surprise that gamers and developers alike want cheaters to be dealt with. Valorant can kiss my ass right now though, at least everything else has the decency to only run when I’m playing a game.