IDF: Intel develops hardware anti cheat for online games

Posted at: 5:54am 20th September 2007 by Ben Hardwidge

All your aimbots are belong to us

The time when you could blame your slapstick Counter-Strike skills on everyone else's aimbots could soon come to an end, as Intel has developed a hardware anti-cheat system for online games. The long-windedly titled Intel Fair Online Gaming Cheat Detection Technology was shown off at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF), and Intel proudly displayed it chucking out aimbots in Quake III: Arena.

Mojtaba Mirashrafi, an Intel engineering manager who helped develop the cheat buster, explained to Custom PC that the feature takes advantage of Intel's Advanced Manageability Technology (AMT). 'We've written some firmware so that when the keyboard and mouse inputs come in, we report those activities to the manageability engine, as well as handing them over to the game,' said Mirashrafi. 'The game will report what kind of inputs it's seeking, and if we detect a difference between the input the game is reporting and what the hardware is reporting, then there's a good chance that somebody's cheating and using an aimbot.'

Mirashrafi explained the use of the ancient Quake III: Arena for the demonstration, saying that 'since we're not in the lab right now, we wanted to get our hands on an open source game that could be modified and make a proof of concept. Obviously, if we had the source code we could modify other games to do the same thing.'

However, the technology will require more than just modifications to the game in order to function properly.' It's a combination of a small modification to the game,' explained Mirashrafi, 'as well as the platform features, and then some modifications on the server side, so that the server is expecting to receive the reports from the client.'

Mirashrafi estimated that the anti-cheat system could be readily available within 'two years,' explaining that 'the technology's developed; it's just a matter of what landing zone they [Intel] want to put it in.'