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Secure Boot, TPM and Anti-Cheat Engines


Anti-cheat engines are now requiring users to have Secure Boot and a fTPM enabled in order to play online multiplayer games. Will this decrease the amount of cheating, or is it a futile attempt at curbing an ever-growing problem?

The last piece of the puzzle required to properly audit the boot environment is to retrieve the PCR bank values in a way that we can attest that they were not modified or altered by the user. If the attestation is properly implemented on the side of the anti-cheat provider, barring any massive yet-undiscovered vulnerability in AMD or Intel’s fTPMs, this would be near impossible to bypass for cheaters. Sadly, while I believe that the only true solution to cheating is server-side behavioural analysis, we don’t currently have the means to easily implement that without the compute costs being prohibitive for developers.

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