At this point, most competitive online multiplayer games on the PC come with some kind of kernel-level anti-cheat software. As weāve 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 likeĀ Valorant andĀ League of Legends and the Vanguard anti-cheat software, has often been one of the earliest to implement new anti-cheat requirements. Thereās already a long list of checks that systems need to clear before theyāll be allowed to play Riotās games online, and now the studio is announcing a new one: a BIOS update requirement that will be imposed on ācertain playersā following Riotās discovery of a UEFI bug that could allow especially dedicated and motivated cheaters to circumvent certain memory protections.
In short, the bug affects the input-output memory management unit (IOMMU) āon some UEFI-based motherboards from multiple vendors.ā 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 PCās memory in ways that could enable cheating.
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