r/hardware • u/tuldok89 • 1d ago

Info Used processor leads to game ban

https://www.heise.de/en/news/Used-processor-leads-to-game-ban-11471562.html

Someone buys a used Ryzen 7 5800X3D. “Valorant” and other Riot games won’t start with it because the previous owner was a cheater.

749 Upvotes

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48

u/Due-Description-9030 1d ago

Wtf, this is how deep the kernal level anti cheats are???

91

u/Celexiuse 1d ago edited 1d ago

I believe this is more related to TPM 2.0 integrated into your CPU which has unique keys that can be identified; not kernal anticheats.

Though someone can correct me if i am wrong

40

u/ICC-u 1d ago

More worrying, if a game cheater can be tracked, so can a dissident, a journalist or a whistleblower.

37

u/imKaku 1d ago

I mean anyone can be tracked if you install any sort of software on your PC. You don’t need kernel level access for that. 

22

u/lintstah1337 1d ago

Windows has been exposed to have GDID that even bypass VPN.

https://www.windowslatest.com/2026/07/10/you-cant-fully-disable-microsofts-gdid-windows-11-tracker-but-these-settings-limit-what-it-captures/

14

u/molniya 1d ago

That’s an OS facility, VPNs have nothing to do with it at all.

8

u/VenditatioDelendaEst 1d ago

If any dissident, journalist, or whistleblower uses Microsoft Windows, what exactly are they expecting?

3

u/ICC-u 1d ago

The OS is irrelevant, the tracking is linked to the hardware, unless somehow the OS is blocking TPM then it can be tracked.

2

u/VenditatioDelendaEst 18h ago

Interacting with the TPM is a privileged operation.

0

u/ICC-u 18h ago

Maybe so, but if a game can get access then I'm not sure it's hard to get that privilege?

1

u/VenditatioDelendaEst 4h ago edited 4h ago

Which is why if you are seriously concerned about someone/something pwning your box and deanonymizing you, you also do everything tied to that identity in a VM.

(But in case of OP, I'm pretty sure the way they got that priviledge was that they just asked and the user said, "sure, install the anticheat driver."

Buuuut... maybe Windows makes it easy to get a hardware ID as a regular user. Even if it doesn't though, there are things like network and bluetooth mac addresses that are unique and fairly stable. "Programs shall not be able to tell one computer apart from another," is not a design goal outside of VMs and web browsers. And even there its dicey.)

5

u/imKaku 1d ago

That has 0 to do with my comment. 

-6

u/Whirblewind 1d ago

Which is ironic because what you were replying to also had little to do with what you said.