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Riot Games has addressed why Valorant’s anti-cheat software is always running in the background.<\/p>\n
<\/span><\/p>\n Over the past few days, a controversy has been brewing in the nascent Valorant<\/strong> community. It all has to do with Vanguard, the game’s anti-cheat tech.<\/p>\n Players in the closed beta<\/a> discovered that the anti-cheat software kicks in as soon as you start your PC, and continues to run in the background even when you’re not playing Valorant. After initially raising concerns that this could affect the performance of other games, or cause unforeseen conflicts, players were alerted to a potentially bigger issue.<\/p>\n It turns out, Vanguard has a kernel driver component<\/a> designed to run in Ring 0 of the Windows kernel, the highest possible access level Windows offers. Software that runs in Ring 0 has unfettered, admin-level access that allows it to scan files and make changes without the user’s knowledge. <\/p>\n In this case, Vanguard’s driver gains these privileges as soon as it loads up after a fresh boot, regardless of whether or not the game itself is running.<\/p>\n Of course, if you’re no longer interested in playing Valorant, the anti-cheat tools can be uninstalled. The idea of such elevated access, however, gave many in the Valorant community pause. For one, even assuming no malice on the part of Riot’s, a breach could expose everyone who has that driver installed to risk, and they wouldn’t even know about it.<\/p>\n In response, Riot’s Paul “RiotArkem” Chamberlain explained<\/a> that a boot-level driver is necessary to counter cheats that rely on booting up before anti-cheats to avoid detection. He also revealed that the driver remains dormant – not scanning any files or sending anything back to Riot – unless the game is running.<\/p>\n