Riot requires BIOS update to play Valorant after discovering bug that allows cheating

Riot discovered and disclosed a vulnerability on motherboards from several brands that can be exploited by advanced cheaters to bypass Valorant’s anti-cheat. Therefore, the company now requires its players to update the BIOS of their cards to be able to play.

The flaw in question concerns a feature called Input-Output Memory Management Unit (IOMMU), which serves to restrict direct access of hardware components to RAM memory (DMA). In short, IOMMU confirms the authenticity of peripherals before allowing direct access to memory.

The bug found by Riot causes the IOMMU to not start completely when the computer is turned on, but the BIOS still indicates that DMA protection is active – information used by Valorant’s anti-cheat to check the integrity of the system.

The company says cards from many brands are affected, such as ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI and ASRock. Therefore, it has already worked with these companies to correct the flaw, and most of them have provided a BIOS update, which has become a requirement to play Valorant.

The use of cheats through DMA devices is one of the most advanced possible, and in many cases it is quite expensive. In other words, there are not many cheaters who could be taking advantage of this flaw, and they are probably people who play in games worth money to compensate for their effort and investment.

To be able to stop the cheating of these dedicated few, thousands of Valorant players will have to update the BIOS of their cards, something that scares most lay users. This type of update is far from being as complex as it was in the past, but it is still not as common for most.

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“BIOS updates aren’t exactly as exciting as looking at ban numbers, but this is a necessary step in our race against hardware cheats,” Riot stated on the matter.

Via: Tom’s Hardware