Denuvo Anti-Cheat patched into Doom Eternal

[Andytizer 269]

Doom Eternal's latest update now include Denuvo Anti-Cheat, not to be confused with Denuvo Anti-Tamper. Unlike Anti-Tamper, Anti-Cheat runs at the ring-0 kernel level of your PC. 

The Anti-Cheat can be uninstalled, however it is reportedly required to run Doom Eternal, even in singleplayer mode. 

One consequence of this new anti-cheat software is that it is now incompatible with Proton (Linux) and its ProtonDB rating has fallen from a previous Platinum award - to completely unplayable.

Irdeto, the company that maintains Denuvo, has been working on this software for quite some time and it appears that Doom Eternal is the first game to use this software. This announcement about the software was made back in March 20, 2019:

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Denuvo Anti-Cheat prevents cheaters from manipulating and extracting data or code to gain an advantage over other gamers. The solution makes use of the latest hardware security features offered by Intel and AMD, combined with Machine Learning of game-agnostic process metrics, to ensure no false positives and maximum detection of cheating. Developed by security experts and video game enthusiasts, Denuvo’s technology has no negative impact on in-game performance and its non-intrusive reporting methodology ensures the developer’s workflow is never impacted.

In this Doom Eternal announcement of May 14, 2020, they state:

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Unlike other anti-cheat solutions, our Anti-Cheat solution does not take screenshots, scan your file system or stream shellcode from the internet. We collect information on how the OS interacts with the game and send the information to Amazon-hosted servers for cheat detection.

Check out our Denuvo wiki article which has been updated with information about Denuvo Anti-Cheat.

[alrayes_brn 3]

Absolutely disgusted by this practice, what a shame.

[Aemony 149]

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Before we published this article, we emailed both Bethesda and Iredeto for their comments. Michail Greshishchev, Product Owner at Denuvo Anti-Cheat, has responded. Here is their response in full:

TR: Why does Denuvo Anti-Cheat run even when the game is in single player?

MG: Denuvo Anti-Cheat doesn't perform cheat detection or collect data outside of competitive multiplayer matches. It starts with the game as the bare minimum technical requirement for achieving detection, just like Epic's Easy Anti-Cheat, Battleye, FACEIT Anti-Cheat, and others (except for Riot's Vanguard, which starts with the OS). This also implies that claims of Denuvo Anti-Cheat impacting singleplayer performance are misinformed.

TR: Many users are reporting that the game is crashing more since the update. Is this tied to the Anti-Cheat?

MG: Unlikely other Anti-Cheats which intrusively block cheats and applications, Denuvo Anti-Cheat only detects and reports. You're free to cheat, mod, and hook your game - but you will be banned from online services if done maliciously in a competitive multiplayer match. This "read only" approach means there is no reason to believe Denuvo would contribute to a game crash.

TR: Why do you believe that a kernel-level Anti-Cheat solution is needed in general?

MG: Denuvo doesn't believe in kernel-level Anti-Cheat, but we recognize it offers the best balance between usability and cheat detection effectiveness. User-level anti-cheats in 2020 are the equivalent of bringing a knife to a gunfight, and rootkit anti-cheats violate gamer's expectation of usability. Existing Anti-Cheats need access to the Windows kernel for cheat detection 'tricks'. Denuvo doesn't really care about the Windows kernel and only needs kernel-level access to take advantage of modern hardware security features offered by Intel, AMD, and their chipsets.

TR: Linux gamers were previously able to play the game on Steam via Proton in singleplayer. Adding Denuvo Anti-Cheat there has blocked that - is there any way that Denuvo Anti-Cheat could allow the single-player to run on virtual machines while protecting multiplayer or removing it?

MG: We've been tracking the Proton issue immediately after launch and are committed to delivering a fix soon. This isn't a request coming to us from a publisher or anything like that - we genuinely respect such an enthusiast community and regret introducing this incompatibility on day 1.

From: https://techraptor.net/gaming/news/doom-eternals-latest-update-breaks-game

So based on the sounds of it, hopefully a fix for Proton will be implemented soon.

[ViperAcidZX 6]

What a sad day to be a Doom fan...