Games

So there's a few ways I’ve been pondering to take this discussion.

Much like how there are users that create software cracks for games, and the game dev uses more sophisticated forms of DRM. There has been an similar arms race between software developers for game cheats. (Imagine an ouroboros) The attacker has the advantage; it's much cheaper to attack than defend.

There has been a new trend of hardware based cheating. Aimbot controllers, expansion cards that let another computer read memory values from ram, poisoned random number generators, remote USB controller debugging, etc.

What kernel level anticheats that enforce secureboot and TPM requirements are hoping to achieve is enforcing the attestation feature of the operating system (typically Windows) that the preboot environment has not been manipulated. Manipulating the preboot environment would allow an attacker to gaslight the kernel level anticheat into believing everything’s fine.

This does little to resolve hardware level cheating. (It does help with stopping early expansion cards from loading modules into memory) What's worse is secureboot+tpm is a defeated technology, relying on security patches to resolve these flaws. However, if your goal is to eliminate knowledgable adversaries they are just going to buy a motherboard with a secureboot issue and do it anyways, and the anticheat developer has no means to reliably triage that against an user with an older or insecure computer.

The cobra effect of anticheat tools like these are they typically eliminate linux players and users with misconfigured or legacy hardware. (such as someone who has installed Windows without using UEFI) These invasive anticheats load before windows at the same time as hardware drivers. (That spinny screen before you get into your desktop). If the anticheat tool malfunctions at this stage it take the whole computer down with it, an expensive problem for a ordinary user that needs hire tech support. And in the case of vanguard it downloads software updates at this point too, if you have slow internet or the update is huge you're stuck waiting to use your computer. And it doesn't even matter if you weren’t intending to play games at that point.

You might draw the conclusion that PC gaming is a dead fish from this information. But an important take away is that some of these issues are present on consoles as well thanks to how share the same framework of ordinary computers or smartphones.