palordrolap@palordrolap@fedia.io
edited

Replying to @⁨yesman@lemmy.world⁊

I would be very interested to know how they are able to identify a specific CPU. The article speculates but does not answer this question.

The fact that this is even possible is a security nightmare.

OK, I've done a bit more digging and pieced it together. Acknowledgement to @dual_sport_dork for prompting me to try (again) to find a command that might do it among other things.

IMO, this sort of information shouldn't be in processors in the first place, but apparently it is there and needs admin/root access to, well, access it.

... and the game in question requires kernel-level anti-cheat, so of course, it has the necessary access.

The command for Linux is sudo dmidecode -t processor, which dumps a lot of info including an ID field, which is supposedly the CPU's specific identifier. It can be grepped for or otherwise filtered out.

My own Ryzen gives 8 hexadecimal pairs, so it's a 64-bit value.

I would not know that that was unique to my specific individual processor if I had not been told, but I'll assume that at least part of it is not unique between Ryzens of the same calibre. (I won't be posting any of it for comparison, for obvious reasons.)

So the upshot is, if you don't want to be identified right down to your CPU, don't run programs as root if there's any chance of them phoning home.

dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️@dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world

Replying to @⁨palordrolap@fedia.io⁊

You can extract the chip’s serial number in software trivially. In Windows, from a commandline:

wmic cpu get pricessorid

I’m positive you can do the same with some Linux command, and failing that certainly with basically every vaguely modern benchmarking tool. Same deal with hard drives and probably also video cards. My BIOS/UEFI even enumerates all my connected hard drive serial numbers on screen if I interrupt its graphical boot screen.

Given that the anti-cheat schemes these competitive games are literal rootkits, I don’t think gathering the user’s hardware serial numbers in order to attempt identify them is much of a stretch.

en