VIC: Evasive Video Game Cheating via Virtual Machine Introspection

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Karkallis, Panicos, Blasco, Jorge
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Karkallis, Panicos
Blasco, Jorge
author_facet Karkallis, Panicos
Blasco, Jorge
contents 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.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_12322
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle VIC: Evasive Video Game Cheating via Virtual Machine Introspection
Karkallis, Panicos
Blasco, Jorge
Cryptography and Security
D.4.6
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.
title VIC: Evasive Video Game Cheating via Virtual Machine Introspection
topic Cryptography and Security
D.4.6
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.12322