why riot's new anti-cheat is a HUGE problem.

I'm kind of pissed off now I'm a gamer first of all also owner of a slick hoodie I know thank you for noticing um Riot is making some changes to the nature of League of Legends that I'm kind of pissed off about for a few reasons one I'm a gamer who plays League of Legends probably an unhealthy amount I probably should uninstall it to begin with but also two I'm a security researcher and I know a lot about how computer security works and the changes that Riot is making to the terms and conditions of League of Legends is extremely problematic for me with those two hats and let me talk to you about why now with season 14 starting in League of Legends Riot is implementing a lot of new changes to the game a lot of them completely warranted for example changes to the MMR system to make MMR a little more transparent and to keep low ELO players like silver players out of platinum games but also in 2014 in season 14 they are going to require Vanguard to be installed on every computer that is playing League of Legends now if you're not familiar with what Vanguard is Vanguard is the anti antiche engine that is used in valerin okay so an anti-che engine is effectively code that runs on the computer and looks for cheaters and I know this sounds like a good idea I mean if you play the video game I'm sure you're aware that valerant and especially League of Legends has a huge issue with cheaters but the problem with the way that anti-che works is that anti-che software is basically just a rootkit that we're okay with and if you don't know what a root kit is if you're watching this video from outside of the security community a rootkit is code that runs at the kernel level as a driver which effectively means if you when you're on a computer you have multiple levels of users you have your base user like when you log into your computer and you can also run code you can run programs as an administrator being in the kernel means you actually have more rights than the system administrator you are running code in a privileged mode of execution in your CPU you can do all kinds of things and from the kernel you can do all the appropriate actions that make sense for for a cheat engine to take you can read all the keystrokes off the keyboard you can read all the mouse inputs you can maybe even take pictures from the webcam to see if someone's actually sitting there playing you could collect a list of running processes and compare them against a known set of cheat engines so if you see that the user is typing at 300 APM the mouse is moving crazy and there's a known cheat engine running then sure that person is a cheater and people actually pay a lot of money to get software to get exploits so that can eventually give malicious actors control of your computer at this level the goal of any hacker is to eventually exploit onto a system and run kernel level code on that system the problem that I have with the Vanguard anti-che engine is that the Vanguard anti-che engine is a kernel level root kit where does the collection stop where does the Privacy begin in a root kit that's ran by a company and what company is this again Riot games and who owns riot games tensent now tensent is a Chinese conglobate company it's a multinational company that's based out of shenzen China uh that in 2011 purchased 92.7% of Riot games and I think recently maybe in 2015 uh purchased the remaining 7% so 10 cent a Chinese company now is a 100% owner of Riot games who will eventually have complete konel level access to all computers that run league of Legends so me being a security researcher I have uninstalled League of Legends from my computer uh provided that tenson did not already drop in the valerant root kit uh into my computer but I'm kind of pissed off about this I wish there was a way that I can continue to play League of Legends but I don't plan on doing that uh given the direction the game is headed I I might literally spend money to buy a second computer that I only turn on to play league but maybe this is just a sign for me to stop playing entirely anyway I know this video is kind of out of the orinary for me this is kind of a Hot Topic that I wanted to talk about it's not really in the same realm that I always make videos about it's not a programming video um but if you enjoyed this if you learned something or maybe you just like my hoodie do me a favor hit that sub button hit like and uh we we'll talk more about more Tech content as the year goes on Happy New Year and uh we'll see you in the next one take care

Channel: Low Level Learning

Views: 321,519

Keywords: malloc, c programming, c++, memory allocators, heap

Id: nk6aKV2rY7E

Length: 4min 19sec (259 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 05 2024