Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 will require PC players to enable both Secure Boot and utilize TPM 2.0 on their machines.
The start of Season 5 for Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 and Warzone will actually serve as the gradual lead-in to the requirements for Black Ops 7. In Season 5, both Secure Boot and TPM 2.0 will be optional and will not be required to be enabled.
If this news sounds familiar to you, that could be because Electronic Arts and Battlefield Studios shared that Battlefield 6 will also require Secure Boot and TPM 2.0 to be enabled on PC.
In the cases of both Call of Duty and Battlefield, these security features will need to be enabled for anti-cheat purposes. Call of Duty with their Ricochet Anti-Cheat and Battlefield with their Javelin Anticheat. Also, can we as an industry just agree on if it's "anti-cheat" or "anticheat" already? This is absurd.
Activision shared some words on what enabling these features means for you and why they're doing it.
TPM 2.0 (Trusted Platform Module) is an industry-standard, hardware-based security feature built onto CPUs or motherboards that verifies the PC’s boot process has not been tampered with. Secure Boot makes sure a PC can only load trusted software when Windows starts. (...)
What these features do:
The final check happens on our servers, making it harder to spoof and ensuring the process is secure from start to finish. We know privacy is important to everyone, and we want to be clear: this process doesn’t give us access to your personal files or information. It only verifies that your system booted cleanly.
As for performance, TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot will not impact in-game quality. These features perform checks during system and game startup but remain inactive while you play.
PC Security Features of Secure Boot and TPM 2.0:
Secure Boot: One of the cornerstones of PC cheating is unsigned or modified code loading during system startup. Secure Boot blocks that method. Windows will only start if it sees trusted software and drivers.
There are several elements at play with TPM 2.0, but here are details on a few that will help in our ongoing effort to deliver fair and fun gameplay:
Platform Configuration Registers (PCRs): Special slots in the TPM that record key details about your system’s startup, helping to detect if anything has been altered. If any security setting is turned off or changed, the system will notice the difference from the original startup record and flag the computer as untrusted.
Sealing and Binding: These functions lock specific data – like login credentials and encryption keys – to your device and its current system state. If the system changes, the data becomes inaccessible.
Remote Attestation: In Call of Duty, your PC (client) needs to communicate with us (server) to play online. TPM 2.0 can prove, or attest, to our servers that your system is in a known and trusted state.
What these features do:
- Validate your PC is launching in a trusted state
- Give us the ability to verify that trusted state in a secure way
- Allow us to confirm required security features are enabled
- Certify only trusted software can load during Windows boot up
The final check happens on our servers, making it harder to spoof and ensuring the process is secure from start to finish. We know privacy is important to everyone, and we want to be clear: this process doesn’t give us access to your personal files or information. It only verifies that your system booted cleanly.
As for performance, TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot will not impact in-game quality. These features perform checks during system and game startup but remain inactive while you play.
PC Security Features of Secure Boot and TPM 2.0:
Secure Boot: One of the cornerstones of PC cheating is unsigned or modified code loading during system startup. Secure Boot blocks that method. Windows will only start if it sees trusted software and drivers.
- What this means for you: Makes cheating at a hardware level much more difficult, ensuring cleaner PCs at start and allowing for more trusted environments for RICOCHET Anti-Cheat to operate in.
There are several elements at play with TPM 2.0, but here are details on a few that will help in our ongoing effort to deliver fair and fun gameplay:
Platform Configuration Registers (PCRs): Special slots in the TPM that record key details about your system’s startup, helping to detect if anything has been altered. If any security setting is turned off or changed, the system will notice the difference from the original startup record and flag the computer as untrusted.
- What this means for you: Makes it more difficult for cheats that rely on bypassing operating system security to be activated.
Sealing and Binding: These functions lock specific data – like login credentials and encryption keys – to your device and its current system state. If the system changes, the data becomes inaccessible.
- What this means to you: Makes it more difficult for cheaters to use evasion tactics, like spoofing.
Remote Attestation: In Call of Duty, your PC (client) needs to communicate with us (server) to play online. TPM 2.0 can prove, or attest, to our servers that your system is in a known and trusted state.
- What this means to you: Faster, more reliable evaluations and more clarity for fair enforcement.
Running Windows 11 isn't a guarantee that these features are enabled, only that it's highly likely that they're already enabled without having to hop into your BIOS to change settings. To verify if TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot are enabled, you can just follow the "Guidance" sections on this Activision Support page. It has images and easy to follow written instructions.
I thought I had virtualization based security disabled on my machine. I forgot that like a year or two back I enabled it to test something out, I can't even remember what now, and I guess I forgot to re-disable virtualization based security after that. Literally checked after reading your comment AzaleaBC .
I've had it on all this time. I'm actually mad at myself. Just removed Virtual Machine Platform and Hypervisor Platform from the installed features and VBS is not enabled anymore. I at least had Memory Integrity switched off still.