Valuing is the new shooter of Riot Games, renowned company behind one of the most famous and appreciated games of the MOBA genre, especially in the eSports field, League of Legends.
Riot's new IP is asserting itself in the video game magnum sea full of first-person shooters and battle royale, but, as in all games of the genre, there is a constant danger for him too: i cheater.
The development team, therefore, has equipped Valorant with an anti-cheat system to be able to counter this scourge and prevent the environment around the game you become toxic. Riot wanted to clarify this system which, to many players, does not seem to be completely crystal clear, seeing themselves "forced" to install an external program.
And Riot confirms. That's right, the anti-cheat system actually installs a driver. The club, however, felt compelled to add some details to reassure the players. The external program that is installed is 100% safe and is also removable.
Vanguard - this is the name of anti-cheating - contains a driver component called vgk.sys (similar to other anti-cheating systems). It is the reason why the game needs to reboot after installation. Vanguard does not trust the computer unless the Vanguard driver is loaded at system startup. This part is less common for anti-cheat systems.
It is useful for stopping cheaters because a common way to bypass anti-cheat systems is to load the cheats before the system boots. Running the driver at system startup makes this much more difficult.
Are players' PCs under control? This external program reads confidential information or has access to data that have nothing to do with Valorant? These and other questions are being asked by some players, but Riot calms down.
We have tried to be very careful with the safety of the driver. We got several research teams to look into it (we don't want to accidentally reduce computer security like other anti-cheat drivers have done in the past).
Furthermore, this driver does not communicate with the network at all and players are free to remove it at will. If you have the game installed, Vanguard will appear in programs with the "remove" option selectable. This system works a bit like Punkbuster, a program that recognizes software used to cheat in games.
For those wondering "why make it removable, then?", Well, by law it is not allowed to force users to keep a program they do not want on their PC forever. On the other hand, if Vanguard were removed, Riot's shooter would no longer launch.
How Vanguard Works
Riot wanted to be clear until the end and described the operation of Vanguard point by point even with technical details.
- Vanguard consists of three components: client , driver e platform .
- The client (user mode) manages all anti-cheat detections while the game is running.
- The client must communicate with the platform to receive detections and to allow a player to play.
- The client does not trust a machine unless it recognizes the driver; untrusted machines cannot play Valorant.
- The driver (kernel mode) is used by the client to validate the system state and to ensure that the client has not been tampered with.
- The driver runs at startup to prevent cheats from loading before client initialization.
- The driver can be uninstalled at any time (“Riot Vanguard” in Add or Remove Programs), although Valorant will not work without it.
- The driver does not collect or send information about the computer to the company.
- The driver was signed by Riot's EV certificate, which in turn was signed by Microsoft.
