this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2025
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I don't think it can work if it's open source probably. There's always ways around anti-cheat. It's only a matter of finding it. Making it open source makes it trivial.
With that said, kernel level anti-cheat doesn't really seem to slow anyone down much. I've heard that the games with them still have plenty of hackers. Why try to solve a problem with such a big weapon if it isn't going to work anyway? Best case, it potentially adds some really deep vulnerabilities to your system, and maybe slightly slows down hackers.
From my limited understanding, it seems like it's dependent on the anti-cheat itself. Riot Vanguard is pretty much the gold standard and it does deter cheating significantly more than others I've seen. Like I think I've seen 2 or 3 cheaters total in 200ish hours of Valorant. Compare that with BattleEye or EAC (Siege and Apex respectively) and you see enough cheaters that it feels like they're cheating every time you lose a fight. These are all kernel-level so it seems that kernel access is required but it also matters how good the actual anti-cheat is.
Edit: It's a bit weird with Apex thkugh because it could just as easily be the broken controller aim assist
Yeah, it obviously is dependent on the AC itself. With that said, there's plenty of games that don't have many cheaters without kernel level AC. I've also heard that Valorant, at least in the past, had some significant issues with cheaters. Maybe that died down, but probably more because Valorant lost some popularity than the cheating issue was solved.
With that said, if you write your own AC on your own engine, it's always going to be better than using off-the-shelf AC on a publicly available engine. A big part of creating cheats is finding vulnerabilities. If it's a well known AC/engine, those are easier to find or already known and documented. Essentially every UE game for many years has hackers at launch, because the same ones work across multiple games, unless you take action to protect against them.
It isn't that Battleye or EAC are bad. They're just ubiquitous. Meanwhile Riot's AC are only in Valorant and LoL, which is a proprietary engine IIRC. That's why it'll have fewer cheaters, not because kernel-level AC is significantly better.