While I don’t usually reply to the whole client sided debate and while you are techinally right that no client sided system can be made invulnerable but that doesn’t mean it’s useless. That’s the same logic as saying “locks can be picked, therefore doors are pointless.” In security, impossibility of perfection is not a reason to stop defense.
While yes, the client can be tampered with. This is not unique to Roblox. Every operating system, AAA game, and secure app in existence runs on a client side machine that is physically owned by the end user. Windows? You own the hardware. Riot Vanguard? You own the hardware. iPhone security checks? Local. The Secure Enclave, the TPM, the Secure Boot, and kernel level anti cheats, they all run on hardware physically owned by the attacker.
But so why do they work? Because they are part of a layered security model, often referred to as defense in depth. Their job is not to eliminate cheating; it’s to detect, slow down, or raise the cost of cheating, ideally enough that it becomes nonviable at scale.
Correct. But so can everything on a server, given physical access or a vulnerability. Your argument is about trust boundaries, not invincibility. The point of a client side anti cheat is to operate within the client trust boundary. You can’t detect injected memory manipulation from the server. You can’t detect hardware assisted aimbots or hypervisor level manipulation from the server. Only the client can see these behaviors in real time.
Not if the anti cheat watches for tampering. Not if its telemetry system notices missing heartbeats. Not if you combine server enforced heuristics, client side monitoring, and redundant code paths. Every commercial anti cheat knows this and they don’t stop trying just because a cheat can theoretically interfere. That’s the entire point of obfuscation, sandboxing, and integrity verification: not to be perfect, but to be effective enough.
The same point as encrypting your bank credentials before sending them across the network the attacker still sees the message, but they don’t understand it. Obfuscation and packing are delay-and-confuse tactics, not silver bullets. Every extra hour spent reversing is an hour less spent cheating.
Also: real client side systems dynamically mutate. Functions can self delete, unpack in memory, load from encrypted tables, verify each other’s behavior, and even set traps that intentionally crash the game under modification. This isn’t new tech this is what Vanguard, BattleEye, and Easy Anti-Cheat do every day. And they’re not made useless by the fact that they run on clients.
Let me put it this way: if clientsided anti cheats are so flawed they shouldn’t exist… then how come every major competitive game uses one? Why doesn’t Riot just do all their anti cheat on the server? Why does Windows Defender run on your machine, not in the cloud?
Because client sided security isn’t optional it’s essential. It’s imperfect, yes. But it’s still the first and most immediate line of defense against local manipulation, sure its alot harder in Roblox and 90% of what a kernel anticheat does can’t be done but that 10% is more than enough because just like how the client is never perfectly secure theres also no perfect hook + many exploits simply don’t have the techinal know how to bypass a well made anti cheat.
