Valorant · 9 min read · Aug 15, 2026

How to Spoof Your HWID for Valorant in 2026

Riot's Vanguard is the most invasive consumer anti-cheat shipping today. It runs before Windows finishes booting, hooks every layer of the driver stack, and correlates about a dozen hardware identifiers so a banned machine stays banned across Windows reinstalls, wiped drives, and new Riot accounts. Here is exactly what it collects, why the usual "just reinstall Windows" advice fails, and the current path back into the game.

What Vanguard actually reads

Every serious anti-cheat, Vanguard included, builds a fingerprint from a set of identifiers that Windows exposes through the SMBIOS tables, disk firmware, the network stack, and the registry. When Riot bans your machine, they store hashes of those identifiers on their side. The next time any Riot account signs in from a device whose hashes match — even partially — the account eats an instant ban.

• SMBIOS motherboard serial, chassis serial, system UUID. Baked into the BIOS at manufacture. Survives every OS reinstall.
• Disk serial numbers and volume IDs. Read straight off the drive firmware — formatting a disk does not change them.
• MAC address per NIC. Physical and virtual. The NIC's ROM address is what Vanguard checks, not the one Windows presents.
• TPM manufacturer + endorsement key. On Windows 11 25H2 this is now hard-required, and TPM 2.0 modules leak their EK cert to anti-cheats.
• Registry HWID vectors. MachineGuid, MachineID, SusClientId, HwProfileGuid, DigitalProductId, MSDM — a fresh Windows install regenerates some of these but not all of them.

Why "reinstall Windows" doesn't work anymore

This was the answer up until around 2022 — wipe Windows, and Vanguard could no longer match your account to the banned install. Riot closed that door hard. Two things happened.

First, Vanguard's driver started reading identifiers Windows regenerates on install alongside ones that come from firmware. Even after a fresh 25H2 install your motherboard serial, disk firmware serial, and TPM EK stay identical. Second, Riot's server-side correlation got smart enough to flag partial matches. You only need three or four unchanged identifiers to trip the ban.

A working spoof has to change everything at once — firmware fields, disk fields, MAC on every adapter, registry vectors, and (on some boards) the TPM manufacturer code — and it has to survive reboots for at least long enough to sign in and warm the account up.

The current working stack

There are two paths that still work on Valorant as of this month. Both start the same way: you need Windows 11 25H2, Secure Boot enabled, TPM 2.0 turned on, HVCI on, and Vanguard configured to load on-demand (Vanguard is no longer a boot driver — you launch it from the tray icon after Windows is up).

Path A — manual BIOS/registry/MAC edit. Free but painful. You flash your motherboard BIOS through the vendor tool (ASUS ROG uses BIOS Renamer, MSI uses M-Flash, Gigabyte uses Q-Flash) with a modded serial. You rotate every disk's firmware serial through vendor-locked tooling. You edit the registry HWID vectors by hand. You rotate every NIC's MAC in the registry override key. On a bad board you spend a weekend on this and one wrong number bricks the boot. On a good board you spend a full day.

Path B — a permanent HWID spoofer. Every identifier gets rewritten in one pass, the machine reboots into a fresh state, and Vanguard's next fingerprint no longer matches the banned one on Riot's side. This is what permspoofer does — it ships one Windows binary that walks the whole stack (SMBIOS via a signed BIOS-flashing helper, disk serials via the drive firmware, MAC per NIC, registry HWID vectors, TPM manufacturer code where applicable), verifies each change, then triggers a reboot. Total time is around ten minutes from click to first sign-in.

Order of operations that works today

1. Confirm you're on Windows 11 25H2. Older builds fail Vanguard's pre-check. Update first.
2. Enable Core Isolation (Memory Integrity / HVCI), Secure Boot, and TPM 2.0. Vanguard refuses to load if any are off.
3. Unplug every non-essential USB device. USB controllers leak serials too.
4. Run the spoof. This is either the manual sequence above or a one-click loader.
5. Let the machine reboot. Do not sign into anything until Windows is fully back up.
6. Verify: motherboard serial, disk serial, MAC on every adapter should all read new values. Any spoofer worth using ships a checker for this.
7. Download the Riot Client fresh, install, right-click Vanguard in the tray to load it on-demand, run its first pre-check, restart once more.
8. Sign in with a new Riot account. Never with the banned one — account-level bans stick to the account no matter what hardware you're on.

Common failure modes and how to fix them

Serials didn't rotate. Usually a locked-down OEM board (ASUS ROG in particular). You need the BIOS-flashing helper the loader ships, or you fall back to the ASUS Fallback / EFI method. A support session with a working spoofer typically fixes this in five minutes.

MAC didn't rotate. Some NICs (older Realtek chips especially) refuse the registry override. Fix by adding a $10 USB Ethernet adapter and using that instead — the new adapter brings its own factory MAC.

Vanguard error VAN 216. This is the "you clicked yes on the wrong pop-up" error. If you're running a startup-app spoofer alongside the permanent one, you have to say No to it on the first restart after a fresh Vanguard install, run Vanguard's pre-check, then say Yes from that point on. There's a whole flow to it in the setup guide.

Banned within an hour of sign-in. Almost always a network-side flag — your public IP is on Riot's list. Power-cycle your router for 15+ minutes to get a fresh DHCP lease, or run through a residential VPN for the first sign-in.

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