Dead by Daylight is an asymmetric horror game — four survivors against one killer — and that unusual structure shapes how cheating, and anti-cheat, play out.
Easy Anti-Cheat protects the game
Dead by Daylight is protected by Easy Anti-Cheat (EAC), the widely licensed system owned by Epic Games. EAC runs partly in kernel mode alongside the game, checking memory integrity, scanning for known cheats and watching for injected code.
Why cheating hits asymmetric games hard
In a 4v1 match, a single cheater ruins the game for everyone on the other side at once. A cheating killer can end a match for four survivors; cheating survivors can make a killer's match unplayable. The small lobby size means one bad actor has an outsized effect, which is why Behaviour Interactive's enforcement matters so much to the community.
How bans work
Behaviour Interactive issues bans for confirmed cheating, with severity escalating for repeat offences. Most bans are account-level. Serious or repeated cases can escalate further, and when enforcement reaches the hardware level, EAC records identifiers from the physical PC so a new account on the same machine can be caught.
Software vs firmware identifiers
As with every kernel anti-cheat, the identifiers split into two groups: software and registry values that can be changed, and firmware-resident values — the SMBIOS UUID, the BIOS serial — that ordinary software cannot rewrite. A hardware ban built on the firmware group is the most durable.
The takeaway
Dead by Daylight's anti-cheat is EAC plus Behaviour Interactive's policy. The asymmetric format raises the stakes — one cheater spoils a whole lobby — so enforcement leans firm, and serious cases reach hardware identifiers rather than stopping at the account.