The tactical shooter Valorant only started a closed beta a few days ago and is already struggling with the first cheaters. Riot Games is strictly against it from the start. To protect Valorant and all future Riot games, the developer uses its own anti-cheat program called Vanguard.
Players have discovered that its kernel driver (vgs.sys) runs permanently on the PC, even if Valorant was not started. Some are now concerned about data protection and possible security holes.
Players worry about that
As the user voidox explains on Reddit, the kernel driver starts automatically as soon as the PC starts up. Then he continues to run in the background – with administrator privileges. The participants of the discussion are concerned with two main concerns:
- Does Vanguard collect and transmit data even when Valorant is not running?
- What happens if Hackers will take advantage of the kernel driver with its extensive permissions in the futureto get access to operating systems?
Voidox also complains that it is not made transparent that the driver remains permanently active outside of the game. The fact that Riot is 100 percent owned by the Chinese tech giant Tencent is mentioned again and again. Many players therefore question the trustworthiness, which the developer repeatedly claims.
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That's what Riot says about the concerns
A few months ago, Riot announced in a developer post that a new anti-cheat system with kernel driver will be used in the future. The reason for this is that many cheaters are now very adept at developing codes in kernel mode that cannot be recognized by normal anti-cheat programs. Therefore be it has become necessary to take harder measures.
As a reaction to the Reddit discussions, Riot's anti-cheat lead RiotArkem answered questions from the players there. Among other things, he makes the following arguments:
- The Vanguard driver should do not send collected information to Riot via PC.
- All cheat scans should only take place while Valorant is running. Therefore, very few resources would be used.
- The driver can be uninstalled at any time (however, it will of course be reinstalled when Valorant is started).
According to his own statement, he tries to be open, but cannot provide too much information about how Vanguard works to keep the system secure. He plans to publish a detailed article on the "Fog of War" (the anti-wallhack tool in Valorant) soon and then smaller reports about Vanguard.
How do you see this controversial topic? Are you worried about possible security holes that could open the way for hackers in your system? Or are you especially happy that life is made difficult for cheaters?
