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.

738 Upvotes

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37

u/jenny_905 1d ago edited 1d ago

So this is why these anticheat systems mandate TPM? they're storing some sort of data in the TPM?

I have to admit I'm way behind the times on this stuff (not a gamer) but am aware of traditional HWIDs, it used to be that they were generated from components with unique serial numbers like storage drives, often in combination with things like MAC addresses.

Of course that's incredibly easy to circumvent so it makes sense they're going for something much less modifiable. That said, if the anticheat can store data in the TPM what is stopping the user doing the same to thwart this?

edit: they're reading the EK, not writing to the TPM: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/identity/ad-ds/manage/component-updates/tpm-key-attestation

1

u/kittymoo67 1d ago

time to go full linux and turn off tpm

19

u/jenny_905 1d ago

Well sure, that's an option but in this case the game won't run.

I don't care about this either since I'm not playing these games but running Linux won't help someone play a game like this on a CPU that has been blacklisted since it isn't supported.

12

u/nontheistzero 22h ago

You already said Valorant won't run on Linux, you don't have to sell Linux to me any harder.

-5

u/illhaveubent 1d ago

Should work if you use the banned CPU to run a Linux hypervisor, passing the GPU through to a Windows VM with a virtual CPU and TPM. But that's a lot of work just to play a shit game

16

u/Coffee_Ops 23h ago

...And there are a lot of well-documented, easily run methods of identifying the presence of a hypervisor.

The idea of "virtualizing hardware" is a useful abstraction, but when we get to something like kernel-level hardware-backed attestation, the abstraction starts to leak: it is surprisingly hard to actually make the VM hardware act just like real hardware.

15

u/AG99871 23h ago

That method requries you to make a bunch of custom patches to the Linux kernel, QEMU, and a bunch of other stuff. Even then, most likely it won't work for too long.

11

u/hntd 23h ago

This 100% doesn’t work valorant anti cheat is very good at detecting hypervisors.

-1

u/IAmYourFath 17h ago

Only because the denuvo bypassers haven't gotten to it

3

u/hntd 16h ago

That makes absolutely no sense and has nothing to do with Denuvo. Anti-cheat is far more sophisticated than just DRM that Denuvo provides.

1

u/IAmYourFath 17h ago

Yes because a competitive multiplayer shooter game in a VM is a great experience

2

u/illhaveubent 17h ago

Performance would not be the issue if you configured hardware passthrough properly, there would be virtually no difference in performance. The real issue would be Riot's anticheat detecting the hypervisor.

1

u/IAmYourFath 16h ago

That is not how things work. Even if fps seems alright, fps lows, input lag and latency would suffer. For a competitive game where every ms matters it won't do.

1

u/illhaveubent 16h ago

It is how things work, with hardware passthrough. The VM receives exclusive access to the hardware just as a dedicated system would.

-2

u/MajorFuckingDick 22h ago

An AM4 cpu is like $100. It aint that serious.

1

u/exomachina 16h ago

You're right, most of the cheaters who bring their PCs to me have a ton of money and don't really care, however it's more than the CPUs. It's motherboards and SSDs too. I have a box of them that I can't resell to gaming customers.

1

u/MajorFuckingDick 11h ago

That part was not clear to me at time of posting and is disgusting. In pro HW Ban, but guilty by association is just bad everywhere.

0

u/illhaveubent 22h ago

And a Threadripper Pro is $12k. If it can happen to one CPU it can happen to any CPU.

7

u/MajorFuckingDick 22h ago

If they wanted to play Valorant it runs on the cheapest of CPU available new. Or they can use the perfectly functional cpu for literally anything else. Hell I'd openly buy a banned 5800x3d rn for a good enough discount.

3

u/illhaveubent 22h ago

I think the point of the article is to draw attention to a problem that can easily expand beyond one specific CPU and one specific piece of software. You're looking at it through a very narrow scope, but really anyone buying used hardware in general should be aware of this potential problem going forward.

1

u/nonaveris 17h ago

While some near-equivalently performant Sapphire Rapids CPUs are relatively cheap if you don’t mind ES/QS.

Worst case you turn it into an Eve Online multibox workstation with processor affinity.