If you’ve played any competitive games, you’ve encountered modern anti-cheat: Battleye (BE), Easy Anti-Cheat (EAC), EA’s Javelin Anticheat, Vanguard, and so on. Much like the antivirus running on your PC, those services are also kernel-level, which theoretically gives them unfettered access to your PC and everything on it. Short of removing them or completely disabling them—which then requires a restart to turn them back on—there is really no easy way to curtail their access.

Kernel-level anticheat has raised privacy and security concerns over the past several years, as critics were quick to point out that it was an extraordinary level of access for something as minor as a game. Those concerns were magnified by the fact that anti-cheat systems are proprietary.

Proponents have argued that kernel-level anti-cheat is necessary to prevent hackers and cheaters from cheating in games. However, that argument doesn’t seem to hold much water, since most competitive games (especially first-person shooters) are inundated with exploits and cheaters anyway.

Kernel-level anti-cheat has also been a recurring issue on Linux operating systems, which has intermittently created problems for gamers on Linux.

With Microsoft tightening up access to the Windows kernel, existing anti-cheat systems will need to be modified to account for the changes. Hopefully, whatever approach anti-cheat developers take will be more friendly towards Linux-based operating systems, given their growing popularity.