Used processor leads to game ban

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.

Question is, what happens if you don’t have dmidecode installed? Even more interesting, what happens if you’ve replaced it with a fake that spews back values of your choosing? If they’re bundling it, given that it appears to be GPL2, they’re opening themselves to a lawsuit unless they provide source upon request.

(Somehow, I don’t think they’re actually using dmidecode.)

What I've read just now is what I'd deliberately not gone looking for up to this point in case I found this out.

Linux and Windows happen to require that the executables that access that information be run with root privileges, but it looks like that's merely an affectation.

It seems that any old piece of software, without root or other privileges, can independently run the CPUID instruction that obtains a processor's serial number.

I do not like this one bit.