With the recent scare in the Minecraft community about the new “CheatBreaker” anti-cheat coming out for certain PotPvP servers, it pays to take a step back from this mess and actually figure something out instead of generating more meaningless hype.
Fair Warning
I am a cheat developer myself, so my opinion on this might be biased. I will try to answer as many questions as possible though that are at least somewhat relevant to the situation at hand, so bear with me.
Q #1: What the hell even is CheatBreaker? Why does it even matter?
“CheatBreaker” seems to be Minecraft server owners solution to the massive amount of cheating (blatant or closet, it doesn't make a damn difference) that happens on Minecraft servers. If this will be effective or not, we cannot exactly know at this time. But, I can give my opinion and try to make some reasonable guesses, but no promises that my assumptions will be correct.
Q #2: So, how is it going to even work?
We don’t know. CheatBreaker relies on the practice of “security by obscurity” to protect its internal anti-cheat solution. Of course, like many systems that are secured by this manner (see: DRM), it doesn't take very long for experienced reverse engineers to crack — or in this case, bypass, it. People are thinking that this will be the end of Minecraft cheating — it will most likely not be anywhere near the end. While it certainly will increase the “barrier to entry” for cheating on Minecraft, it will also attract cheat developers from other games (such as CS:GO or ROBLOX) to make cheats for Minecraft aswell with the looming prospect of how much money they could make off of selling bypasses or other cheating methods.
Q #3: How will it ban people?
On its website, it describes bans as including your HWID (which will be explained later), IP address, and obviously your Minecraft account. There is a few flaws with these types of banishment systems though, and these types of flaws very much should be fixed before release.
Q #4: What even is a “HWID”?
A HWID stands for “HardWare IDentifier”, or basically a unique signature for your computer. When you buy a motherboard, GPU, hard drive, or some other item for your PC, it comes with a serial number or unique identifier for the piece of hardware. A computer program can extract this unique identifier to check if you are licenced, banned, etc. There is a big flaw with these systems though — your HWID can be spoofed or faked to be another players HWID or a bogus one entirely. If you can steal or take someone else’s HWID, you could get them falsely banned from CheatBreaker even if they are not cheating themselves.
Q #5: What about the bans for “opening process hacker”?
As stated on its website, “The use of tools that attempt to read CheatBreaker’s process memory (such as ProcessHacker) are strongly discouraged and can result in a temporary IP/HWID ban for suspicious activity.”
I think this is a pretty stupid one honestly, and will only cause false bans by anti-virus software or people checking their computer for malware.
Q #6: When will it release?
I cant answer this question, myself (or anyone else who isn't a CheatBreaker developer) has zero clue.
Q #7: Will it detect (insert cheat/autoclicker/etc here)?
We do not know at this time what it will detect and what it will not detect.
If you have any more questions, DM/tag me on Twitter (3dsboy08) and I will try to answer your question the best I can and add it to this Q/A article.
The Generational Model of Cheating
I might be going off topic here, but now I must interject this article with a piece about what I like to call the “generational model of cheating”. Tenebrous talked about this idea on his livestream on 7/21/17 and I would like to propose the same idea here.
As you might know, back in 2014/2015, the AntiCheats for Minecraft named “GCheat” and “AntiSkid” were released. This started the transition from the normal hack clients to the ghost clients of today. As has happened before, I think that CheatBreaker will start the transition from ghost clients to (pretty much) undetectable kernel mode cheats for Minecraft. If CheatBreaker does what it says it does, having your cheat run in kernel mode would be the obvious solution. There isn't very much that an anticheat can do to block a cheat running in the same space as it — the cheat has the exact same permissions/access as the anticheat itself. This is what cheats for CS:GO or Rust do today, and will most likely be applied to Minecraft aswell. Right now, there is no “push” to make kernel mode cheats for Minecraft due to the ease of making a cheat for Minecraft, but there will certainly be after CheatBreaker is released. Cheats will only get more “proper” or sophisticated with CheatBreaker’s release.
I think this just about wraps up this article. I will be posting more news or other articles similar to this if you guys would like to. Please post a comment/response if I made a mistake or misquoted something here, so I can fix it. Thanks.
