VIC: Evasive Video Game Cheating via Virtual Machine Introspection

TL;DR

This paper introduces VIC, a novel virtual machine introspection-based cheat that stealthily manipulates online games, bypassing existing anti-cheat systems and demonstrating its effectiveness on popular titles with minimal performance impact.

Contribution

We present VIC, a new virtual machine introspection technique for stealthy game cheats that evade current anti-cheat measures and operate effectively across multiple popular games.

Findings

VIC successfully implements cheats like radar, wall-hack, and trigger-bot.

VIC remains undetected by current anti-cheat systems.

VIC has minimal impact on game performance.

Abstract

Video game cheats modify a video game behaviour to give unfair advantages to some players while bypassing the methods game developers use to detect them. This destroys the experience of online gaming and can result in financial losses for game developers. In this work, we present a new type of game cheat, Virtual machine Introspection Cheat (VIC), that takes advantage of virtual machines to stealthy execute game cheats. VIC employees a hypervisor with introspection enabled to lower the bar of cheating against legacy and modern anti-cheat systems. We demonstrate the feasibility and stealthiness of VIC against three popular games (Fortnite, BlackSquad and Team Fortress 2) that include five different anti-cheats. In particular, we use VIC to implement a cheat radar, a wall-hack cheat and a trigger-bot. To support our claim that this type of cheats can be effectively used, we present the performance impact VICs have on gameplay by monitoring the frames per second (fps) while the cheats are activated. Our experimentation also shows how these cheats are currently undetected by the most popular anti-cheat systems, enabling a new paradigm that can take advantage of cloud infrastructure to offer cheating-as-a-service.