Why Server-Side Is the Only Anti-Cheat That Matters
If your anti-cheat runs on the client, it's already compromised.
That's not a hot take. It's 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 been going on for over a decade, and the cheaters are winning — they always will be, because they have home-field advantage.
The client-side problem
Here's how most anti-cheats work: they ship a binary module to every player's machine. That module scans memory, checks processes, watches for injected DLLs. The cheat community responds by going deeper — kernel-level cheats, hypervisor-based approaches, hardware-level input injection. The anti-cheat goes deeper too, demanding ring-0 access, running at boot time, scanning your entire system.
And you're supposed to trust all of this. You can't read the code. You can't see what it's doing. You can't audit it. You just install a black box with kernel access and hope it's not doing anything sketchy. That's the deal.
For big publishers, maybe that tradeoff makes sense — they have the resources and the legal teams. But for community server owners running Garry's Mod or Minecraft? You're 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's a skill issue.
The server-side approach
Server-side detection flips the entire model. Instead of trying to catch cheats on a machine you don't control, you analyze the data the player sends to your server. Every aim event, every movement tick, every combat interaction — it all flows through the server anyway. The question is whether you're doing anything useful with it.
When you process this data on the server, the player can't interfere. They don't know what you're measuring. They can't hook your analysis code or dump your detection models because none of it runs on their machine. The only thing they can do is play — and if they're cheating, the data tells the story.
What makes server-side hard
The reason more anti-cheats don't take this approach is that it's genuinely difficult. Looking at process lists and memory signatures is straightforward — you match known patterns against a database and flag hits. Analyzing player behavior from raw game data requires actually understanding what cheating looks like in the data, and that understanding needs to generalize across different players, different playstyles, and different skill levels.
A static threshold doesn't cut it. Setting aimSpeed > 500 and calling it a day means you'll either catch obvious rage cheats (which any admin can spot manually) or you'll set the bar low enough to flag legitimate high-skill players. There's no threshold value that separates a good player from a subtle cheater — it's a spectrum, and you need a model that understands the full picture.
That's why we built ChrononLabs around machine learning. Our AI processes 182 general features and 68 tick-based sequence parameters per event. It was trained on thousands of real data points from active gaming communities — actual cheaters and actual legitimate players. The model doesn't look at one number. It looks at the entire shape of how a player aims, reacts, and engages.
The transparency advantage
Because our detection runs on the server and our analysis runs in the cloud, the server plugin itself is just data collection. And because it's just data collection, there's nothing to hide. The plugin is 100% unobfuscated Lua — you can read every line, modify it to suit your server, and verify exactly what it sends. No DRM. No private binary modules. No "trust us."
That's a deliberate choice. When you run someone else's code on your server, you should be able to read it. Full stop.