That’s what happened to a handful of players in different competitive multiplayer games, most recently chronicled in this Reddit post by a German. Valuing player. The poster said they picked up a used Ryzen 7 5800X3D CPU, which worked fine… but they were instantly locked out of the game when they logged in. The culprit (aside from the alleged cheater) is anti-cheat systems that label much more than just your account or IP address. Modern anti-cheat software also tags hardware, down to individual hardware components.
Upon contacting developer Riot support, the user was told that nothing could be done to alleviate the situation. Not only that, but the other components of the player, including the motherboard and storage, were also blacklisted by the Vanguard anti-cheat system.
Hardware identification requires fairly deep connections to a PC’s operating system and even the BIOS. For example, Heise.de reports that Vanguard only works if you have secure boot and a trusted platform module enabled; These are some of the reasons why games like Valuing and others are not yet available on Linux or SteamOS. Similar anti-cheat hardware checks and occasional false positives have been reported for years after second-hand hardware passes to a new owner.
Jon Martindale / Casting
In general, it is not known exactly what controls each anti-cheat system uses. But from a hardware perspective and with those deep kernel-level tools available, it is technically possible for software to identify individual components, including:
- UPC
- Graphic card
- Motherboard
- SSD or hard drive
- network adapter
- Operating system specific license
- Any combination of the above
Other, less invasive data points can be used to fingerprint individual users beyond their accounts.
I’ve reached out to Riot, Valve, and Epic Games, operators of Vanguard, Valve Anti-Cheat, and Easy Anti-Cheat, respectively, for comment on this story. I asked them if they could offer guidance on what hardware could be flagged, how buyers could avoid blacklisted parts on the secondary market, and what recourse an innocent bargain hunter might have if they discover their account is banned after installing a new part. None of them responded before posting. Based on my research on the few cases in recent years, customer support is generally unwilling to lift bans imposed via hardware identification.
