Steam now offers a quick way to check if your PC has Secure Boot enabled. That's probably not information you care to fill your brain up with right now, but you might need to know it at some point soon as the latest games begin to require it to keep cheaters away.
Secure Boot is a security feature within the UEFI and used for signing Kernel-level code that runs on your PC to ensure it's not, er, dodgy. The idea is, if everyone agrees to sign their code using cryptographic keys, an OS and its apps can be more confident that malicious software is not running in the background, such as a rootkit or low-level cheat software.
Game developers are increasingly turning to Secure Boot to ensure their anti-cheat software isn't bypassed. Battlefield 6 has become somewhat infamous for requiring Secure Boot, through EA's Javelin anti-cheat software, though Epic's Easy Anti-Cheat and Riot's Vanguard also require it. Secure Boot will be required to play Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 later this year, too.
The flipside is, there are a good deal of people that don't trust various game developers to have kernel-level access for their anti-cheat applications. The kernel is the most privileged part of your PC, with access to just about anything, and bad kernel-level code can be a real nightmare for security and stability, as proven recently in the case of Easy Anti-Cheat and some Alder Lake chips. There's also the argument that it's just not very good, as it has been compromised in the past.
Secure Boot also doesn't play nicely with Linux, meaning all these games are barred from running on Linux-based machines, even while dual-booting.
"...man, I wish we didn't have to turn on Secure Boot," Battlefield 6 technical director Christian Buhl told us back in August.
"It sucks that there's the friction for Secure Boot. Obviously, we're doing as much as we can to educate people and provide facts and things like that, but at the end of the day, we just decided that was a trade-off that was worth it … As we look around the industry, we see that's a trend other people are heading towards as well," Buhl continues.
So, you might want to know whether Secure Boot is turned on or not in the near-future. Valve has added a quick way to check in the latest version of the Steam beta:
- Head to Help > System Information in the top navigation bar
- Scroll down to 'Operating System'
You'll also find information about the TPM version here. TPM, or Trusted Platform Module, is a tiny hardware block filled with secrets. Generally, this block lives inside your CPU, rather than on an actual dedicated chip, but it essentially allows your PC to partition cryptographic operations away from the rest of your processor to run them more securely.
Microsoft generally recommends turning Secure Boot on with Windows 11 PCs, and PCs must be capable of running it, though it's not required to simply boot the OS. What is required for Windows 11 is a TPM. That, or you bypass the whole requirement altogether with a tool such as Rufus, though you will fall foul of any checks against it.
Both Secure Boot and a TPM need to be enabled in your BIOS to run. How to do this depends on your motherboard manufacturer but here are some links that might help with that:
Valve says this info will land in the Hardware Survey soon enough, meaning we can check to see how many PC gamers are actually enabling the setting. Oh, and if you prefer, you can also check for Secure Boot in your System Information. No need to grab Steam for that.
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