CORSAIR iCUE and Anti-Cheat Programs Explained

When we play online games, we expect an honest battle of skill where the rules are being followed. When that expectation gets broken it becomes a frustrating waste of time. Game developers know the pain, agony, and helplessness that comes with countering a cheater and so begins the arms race between cheat makers and anti-cheat software. With the maturity of these programs alongside our software, there should not be any issues playing online games while using iCUE.

As technology evolves and new games are released, we will be updating our systems to minimize any issues with anti-cheat software. If you encounter an issue, please let us know by opening a support ticket. With that said, lets talk about how iCUE and anti-cheat software may interact to better understand historically problematic areas and where they may appear again in the future.

For anti-cheat to be effective, the way it works has to be a little secretive. We can’t know how any one anti-cheat works and even across different games, the same anti-cheat system may be implemented differently. This makes it difficult to predict which games iCUE will or will not work with. That being said, we can still understand the general goals and strategies of anti-cheat software and use that to help us understand what might be causing issues.

At the core, anti-cheat programs are trying to protect us. So when they see low-level changes in hardware, like iCUE or other RGB controllers regularly do, it tends to raise a red flag. This also includes any hardware integration plug-ins, especially with internal components like motherboards. If a malicious actor were to do something similar, they could introduce new ways to inject code, manipulate the data being used in the game engine, or falsely impose as a human input.

In a similar way, binding multiple actions to one key and using macros have historically caused problems with anti-cheat software. More sophisticated anti-cheat software doesn’t just make sure you’re not running aim_bot.exe in the background. It will look at a player’s inputs and look for suspicious patterns. If they find that someone’s inputs are inhumanly consistent, that might be raise a red flag.

That’s just a brief overview of how iCUE may interact with anti-cheats but there are many other ways to catch a cheater that include monitoring actions beyond the functions of our simple device drivers. We hope this can help point you in the right direction if you are running into issues but there should not be any issues playing online games while using iCUE. If you are having issues with iCUE specifically, please let us know by opening a support ticket.