Electronic Arts announced a new kernel-level anti-cheat system for its PC games. This new anti-cheat system is called EA AntiCheat (EAAC). It is a custom designed system developed in-house by Electronic Arts’ own developers, and the first game to use this system will be FIFA 23. This system will not simply add anti-cheat to every single game, but work on a case-by-case basis.
Elise Murphy, the senior director of game security and anti-cheat in Electronic Arts, explains that the reason for kernel-level anti-cheat system is that the cheaters also develop their software on the kernel-level. This means that security developers also need to step up their efforts and gain the even field to stop them. After the cheat developers proceeded to run on kernel-level, this made it impossible for games to detect the cheating on as they are running in the regular user mode.
Kernel-level anti-cheat systems have one serious concern though, and it is the matter of privacy for users. If there is a vulnerability with these systems, it could cause a lot of huge problems for the users so the developers have to be fully aware and alert to prevent any such incidents. In the meanwhile, EAAC will only run when an EA game runs, and will close when the game is closed. It will not be gathering any other information than the ones related to the game.
