Secure Boot, TPM and Anti-Cheat Engines

Summary

With cheating becoming more and more prevalent in online multiplayer games, some anti-cheat vendors have decided to start leveraging hardware and firmware security features. Electronic Arts recently announced that their newest title, Battlefield 6, would require players to have both Secure Boot and their firmware TPM (supporting the TPM 2.0 spec) enabled in order to be able to play the game. Riot’s Vanguard [has similar requirements for players on Windows 11], and it is suspected that with the upcoming end of Windows 10’s support, Riot will extend that requirement to all players. Secure Boot and TPM 2.0 have been soft requirements to install Windows 11 for some time, so with Windows 10’s end-of-life, it seems like a good time for anti-cheat vendors to require those security features. This sudden change, however, has caused a little uproar in some gaming communities, with some vocal dissenters trying to frame this as nothing more than a ruse to force players on a specific operating system, to prevent them from playing on older hardware, or as a massive overreach that has the sole goal of pilfering players’ data in order to sell it. In order to understand why anti-cheat vendors are now relying on those security features, we must first understand how they work (in this specific context), what are the privacy implications, and why they could be effective at significantly reducing one specific kind of cheating. Important It is important to note that the primary goal of anti-cheat engines is not to prevent cheating before it happens. The goal of anti-cheat engines is to put technological barriers in place to make it harder for cheat developers; to make detection of cheating packages easier; and to ensure that, when detected, banned cheaters are not able to evade their ban.There will always be cheating in any type of game, computerised or not, online or not. However, with proper measures, anti-cheat providers can ensure that the incentive to cheat is greatly reduced. This ...