Riot Games Is Making an Anti-Cheat Change That Could Be Rough On Older PCs (arstechnica.com)
- Reference: 0180425427
- News link: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/12/19/2135223/riot-games-is-making-an-anti-cheat-change-that-could-be-rough-on-older-pcs
- Source link: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/12/some-valorant-players-need-to-update-their-pc-bios-to-keep-anti-cheat-software-happy/
> At this point, most competitive online multiplayer games on the PC come with some kind of kernel-level anti-cheat software. As we've written before, this is software that runs with more elevated privileges than most other apps and games you run on your PC, allowing it to load in earlier and detect advanced methods of cheating. More recently, anti-cheat software has started to require more Windows security features like Secure Boot, a TPM 2.0 module, and virtualization-based memory integrity protection. Riot Games, best known for titles like Valorant and League of Legends and the Vanguard anti-cheat software, has often been one of the earliest to implement new anti-cheat requirements. There's already a [1]long list of checks that systems need to clear before they'll be allowed to play Riot's games online, and now the studio is [2]announcing a new one: [3]a BIOS update requirement that will be imposed on "certain players " following Riot's [4]discovery of a UEFI bug that could allow especially dedicated and motivated cheaters to circumvent certain memory protections.
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> In short, the bug affects the input-output memory management unit (IOMMU) "on some UEFI-based motherboards from multiple vendors." One feature of the IOMMU is to protect system memory from direct access during boot by external hardware devices, which otherwise might manipulate the contents of your PC's memory in ways that could enable cheating. The patch for these security vulnerabilities (CVE-2025-11901, CVE-202514302, CVE-2025-14303, and CVE-2025-14304) fixes a problem where this pre-boot direct memory access (DMA) protection could be disabled even if it was marked as enabled in the BIOS, creating a small window during the boot process where DMA devices could gain access to RAM.
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> The relative obscurity and complexity of this hardware exploit means that Vanguard isn't going to be enforcing these BIOS requirements on every single player of its games. For now, it will just apply to "restricted" players of Valorant whose systems, for one reason or another, are "too similar to cheaters who get around security features in order to become undetectable to Vanguard." But Riot says it's considering rolling the BIOS requirement out to all players in Valorant's highest competitive ranking tiers (Ascendant, Immortal, and Radiant), where there's more to be gained from working around the anti-cheat software. And Riot anti-cheat analyst Mohamed Al-Sharifi says the same restrictions [5]could be turned on for League of Legends, though they aren't currently. If users are blocked from playing by Vanguard, they'll need to download and install the latest BIOS update for their motherboard before they'll be allowed to launch the game.
Riot's new anti-cheat change could create problems for older PCs if the new anti-cheat change is expanded, notes Ars.
The update relies on a BIOS patch to fix a UEFI flaw, and many older motherboards, especially Intel 300-series and AMD AM4 boards, may never receive that update. If Riot flags a system and the manufacturer doesn't provide a patched BIOS, players could be locked out of games despite having otherwise capable hardware.
[1] https://support-valorant.riotgames.com/hc/en-us/articles/22291331362067-Vanguard-Restrictions
[2] https://www.riotgames.com/en/news/vanguard-security-update-motherboard
[3] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/12/some-valorant-players-need-to-update-their-pc-bios-to-keep-anti-cheat-software-happy/
[4] https://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/382314
[5] https://x.com/ItsGamerDoc/status/2001831378401530297
No (Score:3)
You don't get to install a root-kit on my computer. There's 40+ years of computer games I'll never get through, and if I do, your game will be cracked by then, and you'll get no money from me.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't know if it could qualify as a root kit, but this is more than too far for a stupid videogame.
That explained too little (Score:2)
They seem to fear manipulation of the Microsoft hypervisor running VBS. Which is comforting in a way, at least we know their rootkit doesn't go that deep.
Completely unnecessary (Score:3)
Doing all of this is completely unnecessary. First design your game so that the server never trusts the client. Don't give it more information than the human player could themselves see and never rely on any calculations from the client. That's still insufficient though, so it's necessary for the server to collect and analyze the data it receives from the client. Anything that frequently operates outside of the thresholds of human ability is cheating. Cheat programs are still programs and operate algorithmically and can be identifiable in that way.
There's also the matter of what to do with the cheaters. You can ban them out right, but that's just information to the people selling the cheats. They can do A/B testing to detect the detection methods. I think that a better solution is to quarantine them so they only ever play other cheaters. Anyone falsely labeled will lose horribly in this environment and will be washed out of it. Everyone else will only be inconveniencing people as awful as they themselves are. None of it requires users to install or run invasive code on their own machines.
Re: (Score:2)
> There's also the matter of what to do with the cheaters.
I think it's best to silently cripple them so they suck at the game and lose a lot. Nothing overt, just a mild degradation of all their abilities.
Make them miss some most of their shots and inflict less damage, make them heal slower, move slower, make more noise, etc etc. Handicap them just enough so that they seem to suck monkey balls at this game.
Not all the time, not everywhere. Mess with them just enough so the game still seems legit but will always be a miserable experience for them.
How sad (Score:2)
"... a BIOS update requirement that will be imposed on "certain players" following Riot's discovery of a UEFI bug that could allow especially dedicated and motivated cheaters to circumvent certain memory protections."
How sad that anyone would be this motivated to cheat, and even sadder that companies are basically forced to employ more and more draconian measures to combat it, burdening the legit players who just want to enjoy the game.
In conclusion, cheaters suck- they ruin everything for everyone, everywh
Re: (Score:2)
I stopped playing multiplayer games years ago because I can't run my own server and only invite my friends and players I trust into it. Now I just play the single player version of more modern games that require a rootkit on a computer with no Internet access. Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum.
Windows and Anti Cheat is a prison (Score:2)
Is it worth being in prison to play games? Or will you taste freedom instead? This was all predicted on Slashdot over 20 years ago when Microsoft announced "trusted computing" aka Palladium.