REVERSE ENGINEERING CALL OF DUTY ANTI-CHEAT

Summary from the TLDR Web Dev newsletter

Someone reverse-engineered the user-mode anti-cheat (TAC) in Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War. TAC utilizes various protection methods, including Arxan obfuscation, runtime executable decryption, and pointer encryption, to hinder analysis and cheat attempts. This post describes TAC's detection mechanisms, such as API hook detection, debug register checks, and detection of external overlays and cheat logging techniques, along with its process termination methods.