Hi all and sorry if this is not the right section.
As the title says, what I'm trying to achieve is to somehow protect my game application (.exe) against reverse engineers and cheaters.
Little context, I'm hosting an MMORPG private server, and many public cheats work on almost every server. If they get patched, cheat devs usually in a few days try to adjust that.
The most efficient way I managed to find to counter them is to use Themida or VMProtect (it's not 100% guaranteed, but it keeps a lot of cheaters away and makes devs life harder).
Using Themida is a great solution imho because you can use VM Macros to virtualize vital functions + use xbundler to embed other vital files which will be harder to dump and extract.
Here's the point, as you know, Themida triggers many false positives. I honestly don't care about them, but the most annoying is Windows Defender since 90% of the player base uses Windows Defender and probably don't even know how add that as exception.
Submitting each time the .exe for review is not a viable solution, because I'm planning to release updates almost each week, and these are the timings that Microsoft takes to review your submitted file.
PS: without Themida/VMProtect the file is clean (1/74 on VT), with Themida it's 17/74 (WD included).
Again, I'm not doing any blackhat/illegal activity, just trying to help my user base keeping away cheaters as best as i can, and at the same time not having to tell me to add everytime the application to the exceptions.
Some people told me the "best" solution is to buy a code signing certificate, but 300$ for a certificate for 1 year is a cost I can't and don't want to afford.
Any help or suggestion is highly appreciated
Cheers
Valance
As the title says, what I'm trying to achieve is to somehow protect my game application (.exe) against reverse engineers and cheaters.
Little context, I'm hosting an MMORPG private server, and many public cheats work on almost every server. If they get patched, cheat devs usually in a few days try to adjust that.
The most efficient way I managed to find to counter them is to use Themida or VMProtect (it's not 100% guaranteed, but it keeps a lot of cheaters away and makes devs life harder).
Using Themida is a great solution imho because you can use VM Macros to virtualize vital functions + use xbundler to embed other vital files which will be harder to dump and extract.
Here's the point, as you know, Themida triggers many false positives. I honestly don't care about them, but the most annoying is Windows Defender since 90% of the player base uses Windows Defender and probably don't even know how add that as exception.
Submitting each time the .exe for review is not a viable solution, because I'm planning to release updates almost each week, and these are the timings that Microsoft takes to review your submitted file.
PS: without Themida/VMProtect the file is clean (1/74 on VT), with Themida it's 17/74 (WD included).
Again, I'm not doing any blackhat/illegal activity, just trying to help my user base keeping away cheaters as best as i can, and at the same time not having to tell me to add everytime the application to the exceptions.
Some people told me the "best" solution is to buy a code signing certificate, but 300$ for a certificate for 1 year is a cost I can't and don't want to afford.
Any help or suggestion is highly appreciated
Cheers
Valance
