Anticheat privacy

Hi, I’ve been wondering about the invasiveness of anticheat products when it comes to user privacy, particularly anticheat solutions that currently support linux - EAC and Battleye.

Anyone has insight on what information these programs currently aim to collect on the user?

Easy anti cheat runs in userspace on Linux, and thus is slightly less bad than Windows one. There is no info about exact data collection that they do, and they usually claim that they only check for code execution on memory and not scanning user directories (on their website). But EAC is Epic and Tencent, so I actually don’t think anyone can trust what data they collect. I’d not run it at all.

I dunno about BattleEye.

put that shit in a sandbox in a vm or dedicated machine, then you don’t have to worry

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I think it is still has access to personal PC if used through Steam/Proton compatibility layer, but yeah I guess sandboxing the entire steam setup or a VM would solve it. Would a steam flatpak be as effective? Last time I tried EAC (Elden Ring) it was by putting it on a dual boot of Bazzite, so I didn’t care too much about sandboxing.

on its own, absolutely not

I mean sandbox regardless and put on vm or dedicated machine

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Even with a sandbox, depending on what compositor is used it might still be able to obtain some sensitive information e.g. screenshots.

no sane wayland compositor lets a program arbitrarily see other windows or your screen content without explicit user permission

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Then pretty much all of them are insane except for GNOME

Proof that it can obtain stuff like screenshots without permission?

Look into x11 screenshots issue and why Wayland is better

Yeah makes sense. That is exactly what I think should happen too.

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They seem to be claiming that is the case for a lot of wayland compositors, too

for wlroots compositors: install grim, open a sandboxed shell and give it access to the wayland display, and type grim in the sandboxed terminal

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Is there a guide we can follow? Though many of us use VMs, a gaminng VM has special requirements that a lot of us may struggle with, for example GPU passthrough

passthrough is trivial to setup, here is a snippit I modified from the level1techs forum: vfio.sh · GitHub

you can also do single GPU passthrough: GitHub - QaidVoid/Complete-Single-GPU-Passthrough: Single GPU VFIO Passthrough Guide

see also: PCI passthrough via OVMF - ArchWiki

Would having two OS’s on two different drives (aka dualboot) solve the problem of security/privacy with anticheat?

I think only if LUKS is used in the Linux drive.

Though I cant see the anticheat going so fas as enabling EXT4, BTRFS, etc just so to probe around at that level.

You should be fine. Probably.

I would find it ironic and funny if anticheat will go so far as to install kernel level stuff look around other Linux file systems meanwhile Windows wont touch it with a 10foot pole.

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