Employment of Secure Enclaves in Cheat Detection Hardening

Abstract

Over the last years, it has become clear that online games are one of the most used applications on the Internet. This increasing popularity has attracted an influx of players, with some of them trying to gain an unfair advantage for economic reasons, e.g., eSports tournaments, through the use of cheats and exploits. From a different perspective, it is of utmost importance to start analyzing attacks from a defensive perspective to create novel mechanisms that can stop such behaviors. In this work, we introduce a novel solution that extends current anti-cheat solutions through Intel SGX. Our solution moves the core cheat detection engine to a secure enclave provided by SGX while making use of a kernel module for the necessary primitives for system-wide protection. With this, we can prevent client-side tampering in both game code and configuration data by creating a trusted execution environment isolated from the hosting operating system. We are making it capable of preventing the attacker from modifying the cheat detection engine and associated game files. This solution blocks known attacks in games such as CS:GO while maintaining the performance, ensuring gameplay integrity and fairness.