Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC) is an automated system designed to detect cheats installed on users' computers. If a user connects to a VAC-Secured server from a computer with identifiable cheats installed, the VAC system will ban the user from playing that game on VAC-Secured servers in the future.
Banned by Game Developer (Game Ban) Playing games should be fun. In order to ensure the best possible online multiplayer experience, Valve allows developers to implement their own systems that detect and permanently ban any disruptive players, such as those using cheats. Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC) is an anti-cheat software product developed by Valve as a component of the Steam platform, first released with Counter-Strike in 2002. When the software detects a cheat on a player's system, it will ban them in the future, possibly days or weeks after the original detection. It may kick players from the game if it detects errors in their system's memory or hardware. It was launched yesterday by the developers to work in conjunction with the Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC) to bolster their fight against cheaters. Those players who actually want to try it out and cannot wait for the official release can do so by opting into the associated beta depot. 'Cheat developers have specific interest in anti-cheat self-integrity checks. If you can circumvent them, you can effectively patch out or “hook” any anti-cheat code that could lead to a kick or even a ban. In EasyAntiCheat’s case, they use a kernel-mode driver which contains some interesting detection routines. All VAC bans are permanent- Valve has a zero-tolerance policy for cheating and will not lift VAC bans under any circumstances.
Over the weekend, it emerged that Valve’s Anti-Cheat software (VAC) was scanning your computer’s internet history and reporting a list of visited websites back to Valve. Obviously, the internet immediately entered a state of privileged outrage, spitting apoplectically and claiming that Valve was spying on our porn-surfing habits. According to Valve CEO Gabe Newell, though, who took to Reddit to officially respond to the claims, VAC does nothing of the sort — it does search your internet history, but it only looks for very specific markers left behind by certain cheats. Your surfing history is never sent to Valve, and they don’t care about which porn sites you visit.
The original furore stems from a VAC module (DLL file) that was reverse engineered by an enterprising code monkey. The code appeared to go through your local DNS cache (ipconfig /displaydns), and then reporting its findings to Valve. The DNS cache, without turning this into a story about networking, basically has a list of every domain name (and the associated IP address) that your computer’s network adapter has requested. This includes the websites you visit in a browser, but also any domains that you might connect to when gaming, BitTorrenting, etc. The DNS cache essentially has a complete record of every internet service that you’ve touched in some way. Any program running on your PC has access to your DNS cache.
Does Valve Use Anti Cheat On Civ Games Online
A snippet of the VAC DLL that reads your DNS cache [See the full code dump]
Does Valve Use Anti Cheat On Civ Games On
You can see why, at first blush, there was a lot of outrage about VAC’s (apparent) behavior. Just 24 hours later, however, Gabe Newell himself emerged and assuaged all of our fears. In short, VAC does read your DNS cache, but it’s explicitly searching for entries that correlate with specific cheats. Basically, most of the best cheats (i.e. cheats that get around VAC) are commercial — and to prevent the cheats from being pirated (oh the irony) most of them contain DRM. The cheat connects to a remote server to see if the user’s license is valid — thus leaving an entry in the DNS cache. VAC catches that entry, and thus bans the user. Gaben says that, in this case, “Less than a tenth of one percent of clients” were caught out by VAC’s DNS cache parsing. “570 cheaters are being banned as a result.”Furthermore, Newell notes that this particular feature of VAC no longer works. “New cheats are created all the time, detected, banned, and tweaked. This specific VAC test for this specific round of cheats was effective for 13 days, which is fairly typical. It is now no longer active as the cheat providers have worked around it by manipulating the DNS cache of their customers’ client machines.”
All this is actually fairly normal fare for developers of online games. There is always a cat-and-mouse game between cheat makers (which stand to make a large amount of money), and the developer, which stands to lose a lot of trust and money if cheats go unchecked. Unfortunately, this necessitates that anti-cheating solutions like VAC must themselves be mysterious, include questionable functionality such as reading your DNS cache, and be hard for cheat makers to reverse engineer. As always with any software that we run on our computer, we must ultimately trust that the developer won’t do anything nefarious — and in the case of Valve, it has a pretty faultless record when it comes to being trustworthy. I mean, Gabe frickin’ Newell responded directly on Reddit! What more do you want?
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Valve: Trust us, our VAC anti-cheat software isn’t interested in your porn-surfing habits February 18, 2014 at 12:10 pm
Over the weekend, it emerged that Valve’s Anti-Cheat software (VAC) was scanning your computer’s internet history and reporting a list of visited websites back to Valve. Obviously, the internet immediately entered a state of privileged outrage, spitting apoplectically and claiming that Valve was spying on our porn-surfing habits. According to Valve CEO Gabe Newell, though, who took to Reddit to officially respond to the claims, VAC does nothing of the sort — it does search your internet history, but it only looks for very specific markers left behind by certain cheats. Your surfing history is never sent to Valve, and they don’t care about which porn sites you visit.