Riot Games has decided to employ a new anti-cheat system against the ever-growing number of cheaters and cheat-developers for League of Legends.
In an official blog post a few days back, anti-cheat engineer Phil “mirageofpenguins” Koskinas announced that Riot Games will now be using kernel drivers to prevent cheating in League of Legends. These are applications that run at the core of an operating system and something that cheat-developers are targeting these days to bypass traditional anti-cheat systems.
Do note that kernel drivers are already being utilized by other anti-cheat systems like Battleye, Easy Anti-Cheat, and Xingcode3. The current anti-cheat system of League of Legends runs in user-mode, which makes it difficult to fight against any third-party injection at the kernel level. Since Riot Games is moving to multiple games, the developer deemed it best to protect all of its properties with a single, robust, and evolved anti-cheat system. Hence, the new kernel drivers will not only be safeguarding League of Legends but other projects as well.
“Your favorite anti-cheat team has been forced to play this game [League of Legends] from the user-level, effectively giving cheaters a much-needed, twelve-stroke handicap. But as much as we [Riot Games] might like the idea of an ever-escalating appsec war with teenagers, we’re now entering a multi-game universe where linear time and sleep deficits will make this particular strategy untenable.”
Koskinas also noted that the new anti-cheat technology will not give Riot Games “any surveillance capability” that the developer doesn’t already has. “The purpose of this upgrade is to monitor system state for integrity (so we can trust our data) and to make it harder for cheaters to tamper with our games,” said Koskinas to assure against any excessive user-monitoring.
Last October, Riot Games made a ton of new announcements in celebration of the ten-year anniversary of League of Legends. There’s a collectible card game in development, as well as a fighting, role-playing, and shooting game — all set in the League of Legends universe. There’s even an animated series adaptation in the pipelines. 2020 and beyond looks to be packed with excitement for Riot Games and the League of Legends community.
