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[return to "Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm"]
1. jchw+UO2[view] [source] 2025-12-03 17:27:25
>>evolve+(OP)
> and modern multiplayer games with anti-cheat simply do not work through a translation layer, something Valve hopes will change in the future.

Although this is true for most games it is worth noting that it isn't universally true. Usermode anti-cheat does sometimes work verbatim in Wine, and some anti-cheat software has Proton support, though not all developers elect to enable it.

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2. ZiiS+TR2[view] [source] 2025-12-03 17:41:08
>>jchw+UO2
It works in the sense it allows you to run the game; but it does not prevent cheating. Obviously, Window's kernel anti-cheet is also only partially effective anyway, but the point of open-source is to give you control which includes cheating if you want to. Linux's profiling is just too good; full well documented sources for all libraries and kernel, even the graphics are running through easier to understand translation layers rather than signed blobs.
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3. jchw+R13[view] [source] 2025-12-03 18:29:57
>>ZiiS+TR2
Anti-cheat is a misnomer; it's much more about detecting cheats more than it is preventing them. For people who are familiar with how modern anti-cheat systems work, actually cheating is really the easy part; trying to remain undetected is the challenge.

Because of that, usermode anti-cheat is definitely far from useless in Wine; it can still function insofar as it tries to monitor the process space of the game itself. It can't really do a ton to ensure the integrity of Wine directly, but usermode anti-cheat running on Windows can't do much to ensure the integrity of Windows directly either, without going the route of requiring attestation. In fact, for the latest anti-cheat software I've ever attempted to mess with, which to be fair was circa 2016, it is still possible to work around anti-cheat mechanisms by detouring the Windows API calls themselves, to the extent that you can. (If you be somewhat clever it can be pretty useful, and has the bonus of being much harder to detect obviously.)

The limitation is obviously that inside Wine you can't see most Linux resources directly using the same APIs, so you can't go and try to find cheat software directly. But let's be honest, that approach isn't really terribly relevant anymore since it is a horribly fragile and limited way to detect cheats.

For more invasive anti-cheat software, well. We'll see. But just because Windows is closed source hasn't stopped people from patching Windows itself or writing their own kernel drivers. If that really was a significant barrier, Secure Boot and TPM-based attestation wouldn't be on the radar for anti-cheat vendors. Valve however doesn't seem keen to support this approach at all on its hardware, and if that forces anti-cheat vendors to go another way it is probably all the better. I think the secure boot approach has a limited shelf life anyways.

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4. buildb+463[view] [source] 2025-12-03 18:49:52
>>jchw+R13
Speaking of Anti-Cheat and secure boot, you need SB for Battlefield 6. The game won't start without it. So it's happening!

I don't hate the lack of cheating compared to older Battlefield games if I am going to be honest.

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5. koutei+883[view] [source] 2025-12-03 18:59:11
>>buildb+463
> Speaking of Anti-Cheat and secure boot, you need SB for Battlefield 6. The game won't start without it. So it's happening!

I'm curious, does anyone know how exactly they check for this? How was it actually made unspoofable?

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6. vablin+le3[view] [source] 2025-12-03 19:30:30
>>koutei+883
The basic explanation is that it prevents binaries that are not signed by default from being loaded during the boot process. It only restricts the booting process in the uefi stage. If an executable has been modified, then it will not load due to secure boot. Technically there is nothing stopping you from modifying say winload.efi and signing it with your own key then adding that key to your bios keystore so that it will pass secure boot checks and still use secure boot.

I think the biggest thing is that the anticheat devs are using Microsoft's CA to check if your efi executable was signed by Microsoft. If that was the case then its all good and you are allowed to play the game you paid money for.

I haven't tested a self-signed secure boot for battlefield 6, I know some games literally do not care if you signed your own stuff, only if secure boot is actually enabled

edit: Someone else confirmed they require TPM to be enabled too meaning yeah, they are using remote attestation to verify the validity of the signed binary

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