There's no silver bullet. Pledge on a complex application that does too many things [requests too many permissions] doesn't help much.
IMO complexity and churn remain the biggest problems but people are not willing to engage it. There's always at least one legitimate use case for some faddy trendy new feature, always a reason for more complexity, fuck anyone who doesn't want it. And so you get a massive body of constantly changing code that auditors can't keep on top of.
What would it be like if your chat app was max 3000 lines of code and received no more than a handful of small patches per year since 2008? You could audit that in an evening or two and be reasonably confident in its security, and you could also be reasonably confident that it hasn't grown a bunch of new vulns in the next three releases, and you could quickly audit it again to be sure.
Alas, practically nobody takes you seriously if you advocate for simplicity. Usually it's the opposite; I tend to get attacked if I suggest that a program/system might be too complex.
As far as I'm concerned, freetype is another spelling for CVE. There have been multiple high impact vulns. Though it usually seems to require crafted fonts, so I wouldn't be too concerned about window titles using system fonts. Web fonts on the other hand.. disable 'em.
> I understand you really believe everything you’re saying; unfortunately I can’t help but read it as painfully naive.
I'm sharing my experience. I can say that I had very good experience with community moderation for many many years across numerous different games.
By the sound of it, you haven't even tried it, you're just explaining why you don't believe it works?
And the end result then is that you have no moderation. Cheaters can still cheat, griefers can still grief, and hosting your game for a better experience is impossible. Yeah, that's the kind of thing that puts me off a game entirely.
> We did record demos and play them back, but cheaters are intelligent and will do things like change their ID after a game. They use IDs like “iIiiIiliiiiIii1” too, which means getting your report from someone who just takes a screenshot and doesn’t use the in-game report is just noise.
So you didn't check the demo corresponding to the reporter's account and timestamp? Why not? Why don't you have IDs in logs?
My experience comes from 100% free games. Codes and accounts were irrelevant. If you can't earn some reputation and trust on a public server, you can't get invited to a private one. Simple as that. It doesn't matter if wannabe-cheaters can make a million accounts.
> Regardless of that, human moderation efforts are a full time job
For many clans and gaming communities, moderating their turf is a passion project and having the keys is a sought-after position of privilege. They love to spectate and look out for potential new "hires" while keeping the chat clean and kicking out any griefers and cheaters.
> personally I’d be happy to release the server, but the server requires 40 cores and 256G of ram to boot
> the gameserver itself is nearly impossible to load for most people anyway.
I think you lack some imagination. Letting gamers operate their own servers doesn't mean they have to host their own servers. Just like discord "servers" aren't actually hosted by their "owners".
> It sounds easy from the outside; if you think it’s easy I really do have a job for you.
Sorry, not interested in AAA games.
> Maybe I’m stupid.
You're probably not stupid but it's all too common to see people not being able to think outside the box.
I've had good experience in games with human moderation and recorded demos that you can play back to catch and report cheaters. After building some reputation and trust in the community, you'd be permitted to join a server with fewer random new users and practically no cheaters (and usually far more skilled players). No need for intrusive anti-cheat solutions (that IME just gave legit users trouble and still failed to stop cheaters).
Of course, I don't expect AAAs to offer an experience like this, because human moderation doesn't scale cheaply to 10s of millions of players.. race to the bottom <3