Theverge reports,Riot Games recently disclosed a major hardware security vulnerability. This vulnerability exists in a number of mainstream motherboards and may be exploited by cheaters to bypass anti-cheat systems and achieve unfair gaming.at present,Major motherboard manufacturers including ASRock, ASUS, Gigabyte, and MSI have urgently released BIOS update patches to fix the problem.
Riot pointed out that the core of the vulnerability is that it can be exploited by a DMA (direct memory access) hardware device plugged into a PCle slot.The root of the problem is that although the IOMMU (input-output memory management unit) responsible for protection is in a running state, it has not been fully initialized. Its state is vividly likened to a "guard who is on duty but asleep", allowing cheating programs to bypass security protection.
What is even more worrying is that if this vulnerability is not discovered, it will cause all existing DMA detection and protection technologies on the market to fail, posing a widespread threat to the security protection system of the entire gaming industry.
As a response, Riot has added a detection mechanism through its Vanguard anti-cheat software for Valorant, and affected players may be prompted to update their motherboard BIOS to a repaired version before they can continue playing.
It is generally predicted in the industry that the anti-cheating systems of other games are likely to implement similar detection requirements in the future.
