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Fraud Management & Cybercrime
Researchers Collins and Muench on Zero Trust, Memory Hiding and Delayed Bans
Anti-cheat systems in the gaming industry are built to withstand an extreme security challenge – defending against attackers who own the system, control the hardware and can disable protections.
See Also: Organizations Must Focus on Threat Behaviors, Not Flaws
The hostile gaming environment has forced developers to create defenses that assume total system compromise from the outset. This approach has produced innovative security mechanisms that could transform enterprise cybersecurity strategies, particularly in ransomware defense where traditional perimeter security fails.
“When you’re trying to defend a game, you have to run it on a system you have zero control over. The attacker is the user. They have full access to admin privileges, software, firmware, hardware. They’ll turn off normal defenses,” said Sam Collins, Ph.D. researcher at the University of Birmingham.
A recent market analysis also shows that strong anti-cheat defenses result in higher prices for game cheats. “So once again, the defender here cannot win. Cheat will always exist,” said Marius Muench, assistant professor at the University of Birmingham.
In this video interview with Information Security Media Group at Black Hat USA 2025, Collins and Muench also discussed:
- Zero trust architectures that assume complete system compromise;
- Why gaming blocklists for vulnerable drivers outpace enterprise EDR systems;
- How economic warfare strategies increase cheat development costs.
Collins’ research is centered on security of remote systems. His areas of interest include cybersecurity, digital privacy, attacks and defenses in the man-at-the-end scenario found in anti-cheat systems, and protocol analysis. He also teaches reverse engineering and binary analysis via game hacking.
Muench’s main research area is computer security, with a special focus on embedded systems, fuzzing, binary analysis and cellular security. His additional research interests include binary exploitation and software-based defenses.
