Microsoft's updated anti-cheating measures go far beyond Secure Boot, including 'Remote Attestation' for online system verification

I think most of us would agree that cheating is a scourge upon multiplayer gaming. Anyone who's seen a blatant wallhacker or obviously-bot-assisted player rampaging their way across the map like Rambo after too much sugar would likely agree that something should be done. Well, Microsoft appears to be doing that something, as it's laid out its latest anti-cheating features alongside the launch of Call of Duty: Black Ops 7.

Microsoft's four-pronged attack on cheating has two points you'll likely already be familiar with. The first is a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0, which many of you will recognise from the whole Windows 11 unsupported machine upgrade fiasco. The second is Secure Boot, which you may also recognise from the Battlefield 6, err, fiasco, as it needs to be properly enabled on your machine before you can play the game.

The third is Virtualization-based Security (VBS), which is used to keep vital parts of Windows (like the kernel) in an isolated environment. Microsoft says developers using VBS as part of their anti-cheating solution can have "greater certainty that cheats are not interfering with fair game play."

The fourth is called Remote Attestation. This allows a PC to update an external server with its security status, after verifying that the PC is in a "trusted state" as it boots into Windows. That could potentially mean an untrusted flag being raised if something like a modified driver was detected to be in use, or an unusual process was found to be starting up in the background.

Which, on the surface, seems fairly innocuous. However, given the sheer number of programs and drivers running on one machine at any one time, I can't be the only one wondering whether something like, say, a modding tool running for the purposes of altering a singleplayer game to your liking, might trigger a false positive.

It also represents even more data being sent back from your machine to a mysterious server somewhere else, although you could argue that ship sailed a long time ago. MS says it's a "well-documented and industry wide approach", but I'm sure some will have reservations regardless.

According to Microsoft, you can "help game developers build trusted communities" by keeping your firmware and security features up to date, enabling TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot if you haven't already, plus keeping your eyes peeled for any dedicated pages for popular games detailing necessary protections for fair online play. In the meantime, MS says it's "working with partners to build the tools and standards that make gaming safer."

But in the end, only you can prevent forest fires. Sorry, online cheating. The listing of all these features feels like something of a clampdown on Microsoft's part, and looks to be a Windows 11-shaped extension of measures that exist on modern Xbox variants to prevent cheat-based skulduggery.

It also, y'know, prevents people from messing around and modding their consoles beyond Microsoft's liking, too. And while we'd all like online cheating to stop, it does make me wonder how much freedom and control over our own machines we'd need to give up in order to eliminate it entirely.

Is the cure worse than the disease? You decide. Still, with Microsoft's considerable weight behind these initiatives, I'd say it's likely we'll see some (or all) of them being used to some degree in most of our online games in future. I feel safer already.