298
Used processor leads to game ban
(www.heise.de)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2026
298 points (97.8% liked)
Technology
88607 readers
4419 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
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 begrepped 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.
Running proprietary programs as root is my definition of hell, especially when it's something frivolous like a game
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.
You can extract the chip's serial number in software trivially. In Windows, from a commandline:
wmic cpu get pricessoridI'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.
You at least could in the past, I haven't had to do it in a while. Seems like the command would just be "dmidecode", with grep if you're looking to automate it
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.
Supposedly only the pentium III returns serial info with CPUID though, and even then it can be disabled in the bios.
Why not? Is that information considered sensitive? 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.
I can know from the code ;P
have you ever used Gentoo? if you do, you know how long it takes to build updated software from source code.
vetting all that, even just the changes would take a lot more time. and it's a constant effort.
Never used gentoo but i do build the software i use often
First of all, I am, like you and everyone else not alone in this, and for changes it's sooo easy thanks to Git
yes, git is a godsend. but who will you trust that they checked the new code, and found nothing bad? different people have different expectations too.
Idk about other peoples, i usually do this with friends so idk
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?
I wonder if Riot would provide any info on the ban status of a certain component when given its ID...
They would not.
Anyone doing anti-cheat stuff tries to keep it as secret as possible, so that the cheaters have a more difficult time working around it.
It sounds like at least one cheater already figured it out. Just swap the chips. Then sell the old one used and pass the problem onto someone else.
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.
That actually explains why they do not want linux users,I could just modify my OS to not give the right IDs Welp, Unless they made their thingy from scratch instead of using a system component which at that point idk how you would approach it
This has been a thing for decades
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.