Secure IPC (Inter-Process Communication) Between Anti-Cheat Service and Game Client: Advanced Implementation and Real-World Architecture

[Sarah Collins]

I’ve been digging into how top-tier anti-cheat solutions handle IPC with their game clients without adding latency that matters in competitive play, and I’m trying to figure out the practical trade-offs between approaches. For encrypted shared memory, are you folks encrypting the payload before writing to the mapped region, or is the protection more about access-control on the memory segment itself? I’m worried about the overhead of per-frame crypto on high-refresh polling, and whether anyone has real benchmark numbers showing the CPU cost of AES-GCM in a hot loop versus a lighter construction like ChaCha20.

On the named-pipe side, how are you binding authentication to the process token to prevent impersonation attacks—specifically, are you validating the security descriptor on CreateFile, or relying on token impersonation levels like SecurityImpersonation? And does anyone have experience with impersonation being exploited to trick the client into accepting a privileged command from a spoofed parent process? I’d love to hear what you’ve actually seen break in the wild, since the theory is one thing but the exploit patterns are what really convince me.

"Benchmark results tested on clean Windows 11 with Core Isolation disabled."

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