How to Get a Computer’s Hardware ID

By  on  

Cheating in online games is a huge issue these days -- just ask anyone playing PUBG. Cheaters aren't difficult for players to spot but vendors oftentimes don't do enough to punish these villains. Krafton recently announced they would start banning cheaters by hardware ID, which got me thinking about how you can get a user's hardware ID.

There's no definitive "hardware ID" provided by a machine, but you can create your own based on how specific you want to get. The hardware ID you create can be created from multiple pieces of hardware. Let's discover how to get important IDs of different hardware components:

# Get information about the motherboard
wmic baseboard get serialnumber
#> 0JU9387_84S397K

# Get information about the hard drive
wmic diskdrive get serialnumber
#> 1234-5678-9012-3456

# Get information about the CPU
wmic cpu get processorid
#> J8S4332SKJ93

Which hardware elements of the computer to build the hardware ID is up to the developer. I prefer to use maximum punishment by checking any of the components for a banned ID. A cheater could sell one component to another player but the chances are pretty low. Regardless, take action to track users by hardware if you foresee problems!

Recent Features

  • By
    Chris Coyier’s Favorite CodePen Demos

    David asked me if I'd be up for a guest post picking out some of my favorite Pens from CodePen. A daunting task! There are so many! I managed to pick a few though that have blown me away over the past few months. If you...

  • By
    CSS Gradients

    With CSS border-radius, I showed you how CSS can bridge the gap between design and development by adding rounded corners to elements.  CSS gradients are another step in that direction.  Now that CSS gradients are supported in Internet Explorer 8+, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    HTML5 Datalist

    One of the most used JavaScript widgets over the past decade has been the text box autocomplete widget.  Every JavaScript framework has their own autocomplete widget and many of them have become quite advanced.  Much like the placeholder attribute's introduction to markup, a frequently used...

  • By
    MooTools Image Preloading with Progress Bar

    The idea of image preloading has been around since the dawn of the internet. When we didn't have all the fancy stuff we use now, we were forced to use ugly mouseover images to show dynamism. I don't think you were declared an official...

Discussion

    Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!