Valorant's Anti-Cheat Software is Always On, Pretty Invasive

Riot Games is putting out a new FPS called Valorant, which you may have missed if youve been enjoying under-the-rock living for the past few weeks. Early reviews are in and generally glowing, but as we slowly skid closer and closer to a full release, the game has found itself embroiled in its first real controversy: specifically, that its anti-cheat software is extremely invasive, giving itself administrative rights on users systems, and is always online. As you can imagine, this has left people feeling a little spicy.

Over on the newly-created Valorant subreddit, RiotArkem gave a few more details on the program:

[Being always-on] is good for stopping cheaters because a common way to bypass anti-cheat systems is to load cheats before the anti-cheat system starts and either modify system components to contain the cheat or to have the cheat tamper with the anti-cheat system as it loads. Running the driver at system startup time makes this significantly more difficult.

We've tried to be very careful with the security of the driver. We've had multiple external security research teams review it for flawsThe Vanguard driver does not collect or send any information about your computer back to us. Any cheat detection scans will be run by the non-driver component only when the game is running.

While Riot Games claims all these things, and can certainly be trusted to have some expertise on the matter considering they run one of the most popular games on the planet besides Valorant, right now all we can really do is trust theyre telling the truth: theyd hardly be the first company caught farming user data without their consent or knowledge, and using the guise of anti-cheat software is as good a method as any.

That said, they did release a much bigger blog post going into the nuts and bolts of it. I cant make heads or tails of it, but maybe its enough to satisfy the techs who know what theyre talking about.