Security vulnerabilities should be your biggest concern instead of people ruining the fun.įor example, Denuvo Anti-Cheat on Doom Eternal reportedly could reinstall itself after being uninstalled without the game running at all. But knowing the meaning of the term is only half the battle. The problem comes when the assumption results in false-flags, or worse, if somehow the software itself got hacked or repurposed by a malicious third-party. Then these anti-cheats could try to counteract them by blocking those other programs that they assume contain security vulnerabilities. The main argument for a kernel-level anti-cheat is that cheat programs are working at the supervisor level to make sure they could change how the game operates (and that’s why you should always be careful when installing shady cheat. And on the other hand, this is why anti-cheat applications installed device drivers that ask for the kernel-level access. Usually, it’s restricted to device drivers that do need to tweak some system functionality. And that’s why most of the time access to kernel-level is limited and isn’t accessible for ordinary applications. In the context of the privilege level chart above, while there are four Rings (from Ring 0, the most privileged to Ring 3, the least privileged) current modern operating systems only use Ring 0, or kernel-level, for “supervisor” access and Ring 3 for “user” applications. It was built carefully to make sure the structure can last for decades, but if you let any random passerby walking in front of your house to remodel the foundation, your house would instantly collapse.

Think of it as the foundation of your house.

Thus any software that could run at the “kernel-level” could make any kind of changes that affects your entire system. It has complete control over everything that your computer runs software and hardware access, you name it. In case you didn’t know or just heard about it, simply put, kernel is the core program of your computer’s operating system.

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