Valorant's Vanguard anti-cheat now destroys DMA cheat firmware

Riot Games has rolled out a major update to its Vanguard anti-cheat system that makes expensive DMA cheat hardware completely useless in its games. The updated system targets DMA-based cheat firmware that uses SATA and NVMe interfaces, widely regarded inside cheating communities as the safest and most "invisible" solutions available.

DMA, short for Direct Memory Access, allows hardware devices to access system memory without routing every operation through the CPU. These cheat devices use specialized FPGA software to hide them from the operating system and Vanguard while appearing to be real NVMe or SATA SSDs. In reality, the DMA device connected through PCIe is also connected to a second computer where the cheats run, making them harder to detect.

To counter this, Riot is strengthening Vanguard's IOMMU enforcement. IOMMU, or Input-Output Memory Management Unit, is a hardware-level component that controls which devices can access which memory regions. IOMMU generates repeated page faults and restarts that interfere with the firmware running on the DMA device's FPGA, corrupting it and rendering both the hardware and the associated SSD unusable.

This has caused serious headaches for users running expensive DMA setups, including premium H2 boards previously considered extremely difficult to detect. In a new X post, Riot Games shows off a pile of DMA (direct memory access) FPGAs, calling it "a $6k paperweight." Riot goes into detail about how Vanguard is operating following its latest update, which you can check out here.

"Disabling IOMMU allows the cheat device to function again, but IOMMU will still be required to play our games," it writes. "This means the cheat device won't work with our games, but your PC isn't 'bricked.' We would not, and cannot, impact your PC's functionality in any other fashion.

That said, Vanguard has always been a controversial topic given how deeply it integrates into Windows. Riot designed the anti-cheat to operate at the kernel level, giving it extremely high access privileges over the system. While it is done to keep games fair and enjoyable for everyone, the level of system access it requires has long made some players uncomfortable, and that conversation is unlikely to go away.