Epic Games brings Secure Boot and TPM to competitive Fortnite — most players unaffected by new measures

You might have heard some rumors going around recently, claiming Epic would bring the stringent security requirements of other online games to Fortnite. That may yet happen, but it hasn't yet. However, if you're in the extremely tiny elite group of Fortnite players who do join in the official tournaments, you'd better make sure your PC is up to spec with its security hardening, as Epic has just made those measures a requirement to participate.

This isn't actually completely novel; Epic announced almost exactly a year ago that those wanting to join in the FNCS events requiring an account level of 350 or higher would need to have TPM and Secure Boot enabled on their PCs. These features are officially required to run Windows 11, although those requirements are trivial to bypass. However, the news here is that Epic is now requiring these security measures, as well as virtualization-based security, for all Fortnite tournaments.

To spell it out for the kids, that's "all tournaments," not "all players." If you're a casual Fortnite player who doesn't engage with the eSports side of the game personally, you don't need to worry about any of this—yet. Other big games, like Valorant and Battlefield 6, actually require these features to be enabled to play at all. Of course, none of those titles have the player base that Fortnite does, and Epic is likely keenly aware of the PR risks of suddenly cutting off a portion of players over already-controversial security measures.

The goal of the requirements is to lock out players who use cheat programs that evade typical anti-cheat by running in "ring 0", or even "ring -1". In other words, cheat programs that embed themselves in the system kernel, or worse, run as a hypervisor so that anti-cheat software can't detect them. The idea is that installing these tools often requires the user to disable features like virtualization-based security; Epic's thinking is that users with these features disabled are untrustworthy. It's not so far as to accuse insecure users of wrongdoing, but rather a concern that their system environment can't be verified.

If those cheats sound like science fiction to you, they aren't. The battle between game cheaters and game service operators continues apace, with cheaters (or more accurately, cheat providers) coming up with ever more advanced methods to inject cheat functions into games. It's not an exaggeration to say that game cheating and the fight against it is one of the very most forefront battlegrounds in the world of cybersecurity.

But, back to Fortnite; Epic is very serious about keeping its biggest money-maker fair, and it expresses that commitment both in its technical development (as we just discussed) as well as with its legal team. The publisher's blog post lists a short summary of legal actions it took against Fortnite cheaters in 2025, including multiple lawsuits it filed and settlements it reached with cheaters who were selling cheats and even stolen Epic accounts.

The ultimate takeaway is this: if you want to play in Fortnite tournaments, you'd better make sure your system fully meets the requirements for Windows 11. That's possible even if you're running an "unofficial" copy of the operating system, and if you have hardware that is capable of playing Fortnite, it's almost a given that your machine can meet the security requirements. Simply enter your system's UEFI setup and enable "Trusted Computing", "IOMMU" ("VT-d" on Intel systems), and Secure Boot. Unless you've done something really wacky with your configuration, that should get you golden to play in pro Fortnite events. Aside from your skills, anyway, you'll have to bring those yourself.

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