Why are video game cheats written at or why do they operate at the kernel level? Hence why kernel level anti-cheat is a thing for PC games.
In: Technology
For quite a long time now operating systems have had what’s called memory protection. This prevents one program from accessing the memory used by another program. This has 2 major benefits, one is that if a program goes wrong and starts trying to write to the wrong place in memory it won’t crash the entire computer (this was very common in Windows 3.11 and below / MacOS 9 and below), and also makes it more difficult for viruses as they need to get past this protection.
Cheats also need to get past this protection to be able to modify the game while it’s running to be able to insert cheats. And to detect this anti-cheat also needs to get past tried protection to be able to look for programs that are modifying the game.
The kernel is able to give programs permission to read and write the memory of other programs, so both cheats and anti-cheats go to the kernel for this permission.
Latest Answers