EA Anticheat TeamWhy are so many people obsessed with Secure Boot?
A lot of players seem to think it’s some mysterious process that “runs in the background” all the time, but in reality Secure Boot only works during your PC’s startup. Its job is to ensure that only properly signed firmware and bootloaders are allowed to run, so the operating system doesn’t start with tampered code. Once Windows is running, Secure Boot has already finished its work.
The anti-cheat works together with the Secure Boot requirement as an extra barrier against low-level cheats like DMA attacks and unsigned kernel drivers. When the game launches, Javelin checks if Secure Boot was active at startup. If it was off, there’s no guarantee that the system’s kernel wasn’t already tampered with before Windows even began to load — and in that case, the game refuses to start.
Of course, this isn’t a perfect protection against cheaters, nothing is. But imagine what it would look like with Secure Boot disabled, advanced hardware-based cheats would have a much easier time getting in, and the anti-cheat would have fewer ways to trust the integrity of your system before the match even begins.
This means Secure Boot itself doesn’t “stop cheats” while you’re playing, but it raises the bar significantly by making it harder to boot Windows in a pre-compromised state. Combined with Javelin, it becomes part of a chain of protections that make cheating far more expensive and technically challenging.
