I would be very interested to know how they are able to identify a specific CPU. The article speculates but does not answer this question.
The fact that this is even possible is a security nightmare.
OK, I've done a bit more digging and pieced it together. Acknowledgement to @dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world for prompting me to try (again) to find a command that might do it among other things.
IMO, this sort of information shouldn't be in processors in the first place, but apparently it is there and needs admin/root access to, well, access it.
... and the game in question requires kernel-level anti-cheat, so of course, it has the necessary access.
The command for Linux is sudo dmidecode -t processor, which dumps a lot of info including an ID field, which is supposedly the CPU's specific identifier. It can be grepped for or otherwise filtered out.
My own Ryzen gives 8 hexadecimal pairs, so it's a 64-bit value.
I would not know that that was unique to my specific individual processor if I had not been told, but I'll assume that at least part of it is not unique between Ryzens of the same calibre. (I won't be posting any of it for comparison, for obvious reasons.)
So the upshot is, if you don't want to be identified right down to your CPU, don't run programs as root if there's any chance of them phoning home.
You can extract the chip's serial number in software trivially. In Windows, from a commandline:
wmic cpu get pricessorid
I'm positive you can do the same with some Linux command, and failing that certainly with basically every vaguely modern benchmarking tool. Same deal with hard drives and probably also video cards. My BIOS/UEFI even enumerates all my connected hard drive serial numbers on screen if I interrupt its graphical boot screen.
Given that the anti-cheat schemes these competitive games are literal rootkits, I don't think gathering the user's hardware serial numbers in order to attempt identify them is much of a stretch.
This is not running it as root (i.e. privileged userland, still ring 3), this is running it as ring 0 (i.e. the level that the kernel runs at, with no restrictions on access to memory and hardware at all). A tiny bug in ring 0 code can take down the system or open security vulnerabilities, where the kernel can provide more hardening to protect applications to an extent.
You could say this is the inner circle of hell.
I wonder if Riot would provide any info on the ban status of a certain component when given its ID...
From the article, it tracks and blacklists other major system components too, so you would essentially have to replace most of your system. Probably the entire thing, since a single leftover bad component would lead to your entire new system being added to the blacklist.
Question is, what happens if you don't have dmidecode installed? Even more interesting, what happens if you've replaced it with a fake that spews back values of your choosing? If they're bundling it, given that it appears to be GPL2, they're opening themselves to a lawsuit unless they provide source upon request.
(Somehow, I don't think they're actually using dmidecode.)
dmidecode is a tool for reading loads of platform registers, it is obviously not the only way to do it, or even the intended way really. Riot has almost certainly implemented the functionality from scratch in their anticheat, it’s a relatively trivial thing to do.
What I've read just now is what I'd deliberately not gone looking for up to this point in case I found this out.
Linux and Windows happen to require that the executables that access that information be run with root privileges, but it looks like that's merely an affectation.
It seems that any old piece of software, without root or other privileges, can independently run the CPUID instruction that obtains a processor's serial number.
I do not like this one bit.
Are you a believer in the idea "They who have nothing to hide have nothing to fear"? Hint: You shouldn't be.
And do you know for certain that your sandboxes and VMs don't simply pass through the CPUID instruction? And if they don't, do they rotate their fake CPUIDs? And how often does that happen?
Personally I tend to avoid running untrustworthy programs outside of a sandbox or VM.
what does that mean? are you not running any programs at all? you cannot know just by looking at the name if a program reads such sensitive info. and its not unlikely that some developer figured it would be a good idea to include it in automatic crash reports
yes, this is sensitive information. its like your fingerprint, you cannot change it. I think its quite obvious. web browsers firefox is fighting to hide more and more that even indirectly could lead to identification. websites can't read this ID, this is just a comparison.
Either I knew and forgot, or misunderstood it as CPU family identification whenever I've come across it. Denial is also a possibility. We'll see if I remember this in a month or two.
Happened to a coworker with CoD 2019+ with a Facebook marketplace rig. Was also not being smart, and after he got his account banned and not realizing what was going on, he got his brother to log into his account as a sort of test, and also got that account banned.
Dog shit AI slop games anyway
COD hasn’t been good since Black Ops 2
The article says because he installed the chip and launched Valorant, his other PC components such as his motherboard are not also blocked.
He can’t play a Riot game unless he buys an entirely new computer.
It says the ban is only 4 months
uBlock is your friend.
I have uBlock origin, it blocked 5 resources on load but it didn't prevent the "With our Pur subscription you can use heise.de without tracking, external banner and video advertising for €4.95 / month" popup.
You can use uBlock to snap the banner out of existence (it has a mode to delete elements from a website)
I just tried blocking elements one by one this way, and after 3-4 containers it's done, but there is no way to scroll the page. It's not that different from using devtools inspector, but when hacking sites that way, I usually can get scroll working. Either way, it's too much effort to read an article you're not even sure is really that valuable.
Wow, that sucks. I don't even know if you could get your money back for the CPU in that case, as the seller could just claim it wasn't him. Doesn't sound like Riot is being that cooperative in such cases either.
HWID bans usually involve a much larger fingerprint of the system hardware. Riot would have to be really big assholes not to revert the ban, if they were to snapshot the rest of his system and see that only the CPU was part of the original ban.
Phillip Koskinas, Riot’s Head of Anti-Cheat, writes on X that hardware bans last for a maximum of four months and apply exclusively to the game in which a cheater was caught.
Now we have a name. He probably thinks he is doing the Lord's work with kernel-level anticheat, and we should all be grateful for his awesome contributions to gaming 🤣
Meanwhile I play(ed) on a VM and would frequently have to fight with support over: no, fuck you - unban me. Virtual hardware isn't a valid reason to ban every few months. It worked. It was bothersome - so I quit playing. Ample free time for games that weren't user hostile.
Slightly different time and I was using some methods that made it more difficult to determine it waa a VM. Purely guessing - but based on timing it seemed like I wasnt over a threshold - so manual review was used and that wasn't as fast or frequent.
Oh, something about a game that doesn't work on Linux. What are the most direct competitors to Valorant that work on Linux? I'm gonna go play those out of spite.
CS2, if you don't mind the kind of people that play online its a fun game.
To be honest I've never found the mechanics in Counter-Strike games enjoyable. Not trying to hate, I'm sure it's great for those who like it, I just don't think it's for me.
I think the two pvp fps games I've found to have the closest to ideal mechanics is Doom 2016, and Red Eclipse 2. In Doom I liked that it had some of the more Call of Duty-esque features like loadouts, and a multiplayer progression system. And I especially liked how the actual combat preserved that classic arena shooter feel in kind of an brilliant way. They made it so right click had that iron sights feature, but which also applied a secondary fire ability - but crucially it was entirely optional for basically every weapon. Like in classic arena shooters you could be in constant motion and shoot from the hip without any penalties to your aiming.
Red Eclipse does this too (plus has crazy parkour features), but last I checked lacks any kind of progression system for better and worse.
Titanfall 2 is pretty fun as well, but I am really bad at that game in multiplayer.
The odds of this happening are so low, but at the same inevitable.
Funny. Sucks for the buyer.
Even if I'd ever switched back to Windows, no kernel anti-cheat would ever be allowed without some kind of isolation. It is just another data theft tool that happens to also include half-broken anti-cheat. I'm sure gaming companies have already started selling data for profit.
not op but surely Riot isn't only looking at CPUs for hardware bans? That leads to all kinda of funky stuff like... well, this. Usually fingerprinting via hardware is a more complete package no?
What about this story to you is in any way implausible?
They've been hardware finger printing for years now. They one hundred percent know if you're a piss drinking titty fucker just from your chipset.
Pfft, like they need my chipset for that
Their fingerprinting is flawed if this story is true. If I take someone else's CPU and drop it into what is otherwise different hardware then the fingerprint should absolutely change. If it doesn't then their fingerprinting is broken and this is going to happen whether any particular CPU has been banned or not.
It seems far more plausible that someone got themselves banned and they're lying to try to get out of it.
Fingerprinting that is that hyperspecific is the one that's actually flawed. If you could circumvent a hardware ban by rearranging your RAM sticks, it wouldn't be much good.
As it is, the CPU is the one most stable, expensive, and difficult piece to replace, so it makes sense to ban on that alone.
But, I do agree that cheaters are really slimy fuckers, so what you're saying is certainly possible. I remember a kid that had his grandmother bring his computer into the shop to see we could evade his hw ban, talked his grandmother into agrreing to buy him a new GPU right in front of us before we turned him down flat.
In this case they even had a completely different install of Windows. There is simply no way at all that the fingerprint should match. If it did match, then their implementation sucks. Fuck them if they made it that bad intentionally. Better to have to catch and ban the same person 10 times than ban an innocent person even once.
I just quit gaming. I refuse to be a beta. I don't give a fuck no more. After Holocaust 2.0 these types of things bring me no joy. Grow up
Holocaust 2.0?
Also, I use one criteria for defining an adult:
"An adult is a person who understands when it is apropriate to be childish"
Just telling others to "Grow up" means that you have a lot of growing up to do yourself.
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Send it to me, I consider a processor incapable of playing Valorant to be a free upgrade
save