Why is hard to stop cheating 2

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One of the main problems, he says, is that the openness we PC gamers love to celebrate makes it hard to control what's going on in PC games. Since most files required to run a game are on the player's PC and out of reach of the developer, that player can work with the game files to exploit bugs or flaws, automate systems that would normally require human input, or any number of other offensive actions.

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"Because games are applications running in open and uncontrolled environments [ie, a customer's PC], we can only put barriers around them that are becoming harder and harder to solve, basically raising the skill ceiling needed to create such cheats."

For Harton, those barriers include what he calls "sanity checks," which monitor actions that always perform a certain way, such as bullet trajectory, and flag violations of those physics. Many cheat coders also use the same code variants in their works, and recognizing those patterns can help find the actual cheat. He says he and Bohemia Interactive operate under two rules in regards to cheating, that "anything on the client can be and will be hacked" and that "server side code is only as secure as the server."
"The best solution would be to run everything server side, which we cannot do for the most part," he says.

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Having all the files for a game on the developer's server would prevent most cheats, although Harton cautions that this method still leaves open the "possibility of packet injection and manipulation." If there's nothing to detect the manipulation of the encrypted packet data moving between server and client in place, cheaters could trick the server into thinking the character on the client has more health than it actually does. Moving everything server-side also brings us into the thorny bounds of heavy Digital Rights Management, of course, but Harton seems to believe that players have a while before they have to worry about that, owing to the current limitations of internet latency and speed.

"Depending on the genre and speed of the game, it becomes a harder and harder issue to solve in general," he says.
The struggle to bridge the gap between client and server can lead developers down other controversial paths, as well. Harton only mentions Bohemia Interactive's preferred anticheat client, BattlEye, in passing, but earlier this year it raised an alarm in the ARK: Survival Evolved community after players reported that it was digging through their personal files. A BattlEye rep at the time didn't shy from admitting it was "very invasive" and that "it has to be so that it's able to fully do its job."

"Yes, BattlEye has to be able to scan all memory (RAM) and all game- and system-related files on disk," a BattlEye dev wrote in a Steam forum post from February. "However, this does not mean that BE is looking through your personal files, credit card details or other such information and sends them to our servers."

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from pcgamer.com