Anti-cheat6 September 20264 min read

Secure Boot is turning into the price of entry

Some titles now refuse to start without platform attestation, and the question is moving from what a driver sees to what the firmware will vouch for.

By Lethal Research

For years, arguments about anti-cheat focused on what a kernel driver could see once the game was running. That question is being replaced by another, because more titles now refuse to start unless the machine can prove something about itself before Windows finishes booting.

What do these three games now require?

Title	What it now requires	How firm
Battlefield 6	Secure Boot and TPM 2.0. ReportedReporting describes EA's Javelin as kernel-level and says it starts with Windows rather than with the game.	Hard. The game does not launch, and the error names the anti-cheat.
Call of Duty	TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot on Windows 11, per the publisher's own support article.	Hard, and first-party documented.
Rainbow Six Siege	ReportedTwo-step verification with a linked phone number for ranked, per 2026 reporting.	A different kind of attestation: identity rather than firmware.

The three mechanisms differ, but they share one idea: a condition checked before you are allowed to play, not a scan performed while you do.

What does this change for a two-machine build?

It changes less than people assume, but one change is real: the gaming PC now has settings you are no longer free to adjust. Secure Boot has to be switched on and stay on. Advice telling you to turn it off comes from older titles and should not be applied to these games.

None of this applies to the second machine. Nothing on the gaming PC inspects it, so its firmware settings stay as they were. When the advice for each machine is quoted without saying which machine it applies to, the two halves look like a contradiction.

Why the trend matters more than any one title

Any one of these requirements could be relaxed or worked around, but the pattern underneath is the part that lasts. The industry is moving its checks earlier, from what runs during a session to what the platform will vouch for before a session starts. That is a change in where the boundary sits, not a claim that anything is or is not detectable.

A requirement checked before launch is also easier to communicate than a scan performed during play. A player either meets it or gets an error that names the reason. That clarity is part of why publishers like it, and it is why this trend is likely to keep spreading rather than reverse.

What we could not confirm about Javelin

UnconfirmedWe found no first-party EA page describing Javelin, so what the table says about it comes from press reporting and is marked as such. This gap matters more than it might seem. The title making the strongest platform demand is also the one whose anti-cheat is documented mainly by people who do not build it.

External projectTrusted Platform Module and Secure Boot (Activision Support)Activision's own statement of the requirement. Call of Duty is the only title in the table with a first-party statement like this.

External projectKernel DMA Protection (Microsoft Learn)The platform-side policy that sits alongside this trend, including the limits Microsoft states for it.

The practical advice has not changed: set up the gaming PC for the title you actually play, and leave the second machine alone. If a guide tells you to disable a setting your game requires, treat that guide as out of date. The rest is a trend to watch rather than something to act on today.

The guides behind this post

Battlefield 6: an anti-cheat that starts before the game does

5 min read

Battlefield 6 runs EA's own anti-cheat, Javelin, and requires Secure Boot and TPM 2.0. Reporting says Javelin loads with Windows rather than when the game launches, so what a DMA build faces here is not yet settled. This store sells no cheat for Battlefield 6, DMA or external.

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