Cheating in eSports: Analysis of Anti-Cheat Techniques and Development of a Game-Agnostic Solution

Esports has emerged as a highly popular and widely watched form of entertainment in recent years. It has evolved into a thriving industry that generates profits for a wide range of stakeholders, including event organizers, players, sponsors, and broadcasters. However, maintaining the integrity of the game is crucial to ensuring fair competition, and cheating is a significant threat to this trust in the eSports landscape. Cheating in eSports involves a variety of techniques, including exploits and software/hardware tampering, with the aim of gaining an unfair advantage that could affect the outcome of a competition. This undermines sportsmanship, integrity, and the reputations of organizers, players, and sponsors, thus negatively impacting the industry as a whole. The aim of this thesis, in collaboration with Spike Reply, is to develop an efficient and advanced anti-cheat solution that is game agnostic and does not require any special code implementation or adaptation on the game side. In the initial phase of the thesis, an analysis was conducted on modern cheating techniques to identify the attacks that the anti-cheat software must protect the game from. The study involved some of the most popular games, analyzed using various memory analysis tools, debuggers and other reverse engineering tools. To determine the requirements for effective anti-cheat software, several anti-cheat techniques were also examined. The software must protect the game without interfering with its functioning or compromising user privacy. Additionally, a comparative study was conducted on the most widely used anti-cheat solutions. Following the research phase, a custom solution was designed and implemented. Multiple approaches were evaluated before the final implementation, resulting in a solution consisting of two software modules that communicate seamlessly. The first module, a kernel driver, enforces controls in kernel space, addressing process and memory access, loaded DLLs, and loaded driver modules. The second module ensures the stability of the kernel module, interacting with the user to select the game, launching and initializing the protection controls. The solution was tested with popular eSports games to collect data on its effectiveness and performance impact on gameplay. The thesis concludes by evaluating potential future developments of the proposed solution and exploring emerging techniques and technologies that can be leveraged in anti-cheat software to address future trends.