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Begun the kernel wars have (feddit.uk)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/games@lemmy.world
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Battledield now throwing an error because Valorant is already sitting in kernel memory. Time to buy your EA Battlefield PC but don't forget your Valorant PC

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[–] 6 points 1 year ago (6 children)

code running in kernel space is hugely privileged… it can open up enormous security vulnerabilities because when you’re in the kernel you can bypass a LOT of security checks and restrictions… windows code is generally pretty well tested, so is unlikely to have particularly bad bugs like RCEs etc… but these kernel mode apps aren’t nearly as rigorously tested - things like this is what lead to the crowdstrike outage

things running in the kernel can also cause a lot more damage than user space apps, because the kernel doesn’t do a lot of the error checking and validation that stops things like kernel panics

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    And anti-cheat needs a lot of access (e.g. read app memory) and sees a lot of churn to evolve with cheat engines. More churn means less thorough testing, which means higher likelihood of an exploit.

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  • [–] -2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    If you really want to be secure, you can't do gaming on the same machine as your security sensitive stuff. It's not limited to these anti-cheats.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    that is wildly inaccurate. do you have a source?

    and also, security isn’t about 100% guarantees… we each have our own risk profile: regular joe gamer doesn’t need to be as security conscious as someone working for the NSA… their risks are different, because their exploitation value is different… most people only need to protect themselves from generalised attacks because they’re not going to be targeted

    kernel level apps, however, blast a massive hole in the walls that keep us secure and potentially open attack vectors for generalised attacks… it’s just not worth that risk

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    You're running closed source software that has permissions to read your keyboard input to other applications (other than apps running as admin), they can access your files, and and they can communicate over the Internet.

    You're inherently trusting these publishers if you're gaming on Windows. Who is the publisher of Darkest Dungeon or Deep Rock Galactic or Lethal Company?

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