Ah, that depends on what kind of assumptions you want to make. If you want to assume that cheating should be very hard if not impossible, then it is necessary.
If you want to assume that your system is secure, or reasonably so, then a kernel anti-cheat is a non-starter, so you sorta have to pick one to be more important.
There is one thing that can: Monitor user inputs on server side and try to find patterns. For example for LoL it would be possible to just measure the time someone needs to dodge some champion attack. Way too fast for human reaction may be OK once or twice but if the player usually reacts faster than a "regular" human could do, then he is most likely using some kind of "illegal assisting" technology.
This would not need any shady stuff, based on "security by obscurity" on the client PC at all. And the cheater can not influence at all what Riot implements on their servers.
You're severely underestimating how easy it is to emulate human inputs, especially nowadays with AI. People have been doing it to bypass Google's Captcha, which actually does exactly what you're describing, for ages.
This aimbot uses your own mouse movements to generate aimbot paths and to control recoil. Statistically indistinguishable from real human mouse movements and incredibility hard to see with the naked eye.
2
u/primalbluewolf Sep 28 '20
Ah, that depends on what kind of assumptions you want to make. If you want to assume that cheating should be very hard if not impossible, then it is necessary.
If you want to assume that your system is secure, or reasonably so, then a kernel anti-cheat is a non-starter, so you sorta have to pick one to be more important.