Why server-side is the only anti-cheat that matters
If your anti-cheat runs on the client, it is already compromised.
That is not a hot take. It is just how software works. Any code running on a machine the player controls can be dumped, reverse engineered, hooked, and neutralized. The arms race between cheat developers and client-side anti-cheats has run for over a decade, and the cheaters are winning. They always will be, because they have home-field advantage.
The client-side problem
Here is how most anti-cheats work. They ship a binary module to every player's machine. That module scans memory, checks processes, and watches for injected DLLs. The cheat community responds by going deeper, with kernel-level cheats, hypervisor-based approaches, and hardware-level input injection. The anti-cheat goes deeper too, demanding ring-0 access, running at boot, scanning your entire system.
And you are supposed to trust all of it. You cannot read the code. You cannot see what it is doing. You cannot audit it. You install a black box with kernel access and hope it is not doing anything sketchy. That is the deal.
For a big publisher, maybe that tradeoff makes sense. They have the resources and the legal teams. For a smaller studio, or a community running Garry's Mod or Minecraft, you are installing opaque, obfuscated binaries with no way to verify what they actually do. And when they break, and they will break, the developer tells you it is a skill issue.
The server-side approach
Server-side detection flips the model. Instead of catching cheats on a machine you do not control, you analyze the data the player sends to your server. Every aim event, every movement tick, every combat interaction already flows through the server. The only question is whether you are doing anything useful with it.
When you process that data on the server, the player cannot interfere. They do not know what you are measuring. They cannot hook your analysis or dump your model, because none of it runs on their machine. The only thing they can do is play, and if they are cheating, the data tells the story.
What makes server-side hard
The reason more anti-cheats do not take this route is that it is genuinely difficult. Matching process lists and memory signatures is straightforward: you check known patterns against a database and flag hits. Reading player behavior from raw game data means actually understanding what cheating looks like in the data, and that understanding has to generalize across different players, playstyles, and skill levels.
A static threshold does not cut it. Setting aimSpeed > 500 and calling it a day means you either catch only the obvious rage cheats, which any admin can spot by hand, or you set the bar low enough to flag legitimate high-skill players. No single threshold cleanly separates a good player from a subtle cheater. It is a spectrum, and you need a model that reads the whole picture.
That is why we built ChrononLabs around machine learning. The model reads 182 general features and 68 tick-based sequence parameters per event, trained on thousands of real data points from active communities, actual cheaters and actual legitimate players. It does not look at one number. It looks at the entire shape of how a player aims, reacts, and engages.
The transparency advantage
Because detection runs on the server and the analysis runs on our infrastructure, the integration itself is just data collection. And because it is just data collection, there is nothing to hide. It is unobfuscated and readable: you can see every line, adapt it to your server, and verify exactly what it sends. No DRM, no private binary modules, no "trust us."
That is a deliberate choice. When you run someone else's code on your server, you should be able to read it. Full stop.