Valorant - Secure Boot

Without Secure Boot, a cheat could load a rootkit into the UEFI. Vanguard would look at the running system, see no anomalies, and let the cheater play. With Secure Boot on, that UEFI rootkit is stopped before it ever reaches the RAM. The backlash against the Secure Boot requirement was fierce. Players took to Reddit and Twitter with valid concerns:

Some legacy motherboard utilities or fan control software rely on unsigned drivers. Enabling Secure Boot sometimes breaks these. Players with older hardware (pre-2016) often find their RGB software or overclocking profiles stop working.

Professional esports integrity has improved. Players can no longer use USB injection devices or firmware-based recoil macros because Secure Boot + Vanguard flags them as suspicious. valorant secure boot

The short answer is no. The long answer involves kernel-level drivers, billion-dollar cheating industries, and a fundamental shift in how PC gaming handles security. Let’s break down exactly what VALORANT’s Secure Boot requirement is, why it exists, and how to fix it without compromising your PC’s safety. To understand Secure Boot, you first have to understand the enemy. In the early 2010s, cheating software was relatively simple. Bots would read pixel colors; aimbots would move your mouse. Traditional anti-cheat software (like Easy Anti-Cheat or BattlEye) worked by scanning the game’s memory .

In five years, you likely won’t be able to play any major competitive online game without Secure Boot and TPM 2.0 enabled. As a gamer, being asked to dig into your BIOS is frustrating. Being told your perfectly functional five-year-old PC is suddenly "incompatible" stings. And the privacy concerns surrounding kernel-level anti-cheat are valid and worth discussing. Without Secure Boot, a cheat could load a

Secure Boot can interfere with Linux bootloaders (like GRUB) if they aren’t properly signed. While most modern distros (Ubuntu, Fedora) support Secure Boot via Microsoft’s signature, others require you to disable it. VALORANT forces you to choose between your favorite Linux distro and the game.

Vanguard loads the moment you turn on your PC, not just when you launch VALORANT. This allows it to catch bootkits before they can hide. However, even Vanguard had a blind spot. A sophisticated attacker could still flash a malicious driver into the (the software that boots your motherboard). If the cheat lives in the BIOS itself, even a kernel driver is helpless. The backlash against the Secure Boot requirement was fierce

Check if you are running "Custom Mode" for Secure Boot. Switch it to "Standard Mode". Also, ensure your boot drive is GPT formatted (not MBR). The Future: Is This the New Normal? The Secure Boot requirement for VALORANT is not an anomaly—it is the canary in the coal mine. Microsoft already requires it for Windows 11. Epic Games is experimenting with stricter kernel enforcement for Fortnite. Even Call of Duty ’s Ricochet anti-cheat is moving toward firmware-level checks.