I’ve been reversing Black Ops Cold War for a while now, and I’ve finally decided to share my research regarding the user-mode anti-cheat inside the game. It’s not my intention to shame or promote cheating/bypassing of the anti-cheat, so I’ve redacted a few things.
To clear up any confusion, Black Ops Cold War does not have the kernel-mode component of Ricochet that Modern Warfare (2019) and later titles have. I’ll be referring to the anti-cheat as TAC (Treyarch Anti-Cheat) as the game I reversed is a Treyarch game. Also, whenever I provide function pseudocode, it will be the best I can do since the actual decompilation is super cluttered with a lot of junk/resolving code. The biggest difference between the newer games is the kernel-mode driver, while the majority of anti-cheat code is user-mode and very similar to TAC.