Comment by Asooka
The cat and mouse game between cheat devs and anti-cheat devs is quite interesting. I saw a nice video [1] a year ago about the state of the art in cheat development, which at that point was having a PCIe device that can issue DMA requests to read the RAM at any time and stream the data to a second PC to analyse. Vanguard did end up banning those people eventually, since it can see what devices you have plugged in. I can't help but wonder if the next level would be some kind of shim on the physical RAM sticks; or maybe custom UEFI firmware.
Ultimately the OS should be providing a service that can verify a program is running in a secure environment and hasn't been tampered with. That's something that's useful for things far beyond games. I kind of hope the cheaters win this war for now, to create the incentive for building a better, proper, standardized, cross-platform solution.
> Vanguard did end up banning those people eventually, since it can see what devices you have plugged in.
Only because the makers of those DMA cards do a bad job hiding themselves. They either use vague, recognisable names, or don't act like the devices they're spoofing.
The moment a cheat developer manages to reprogram an actual SSD (especially a common model), hardware detection like that becomes near impossible.