Anti-Cheat: Attacks and the Effectiveness of Client-Side Defences

This paper studies game cheats as one of the most widespread forms of man-at-the-end (MATE) attacks. We analyse 80 representative web sites selling game cheats, finding an active market, with cheats selling for up to hundreds of dollars a month. We conservatively estimate the combined revenue from selling these MATE attacks to range between $12.8M and $73.2M annually. To find out how game companies attempt to stop these attacks, we survey game cheat forums and experiment with the client-side anti-cheat solutions of 11 different popular competitive multiplayer shooter titles. We create a classification of defense techniques used by these anti-cheat solutions and create a benchmark to assess their technical sturdiness. Our findings suggest that prices for cheats are closely correlated to the technical sturdiness of the anti-cheat software they have to overcome. This correlation exceeds any other factor including, perhaps surprisingly, the popularity of the game targeted by the cheat. This shows that strong defenses against MATE attacks have a measurable real world impact.