Bans match on identifiers such as a license, a Discord account or a hardware ID, and a determined cheater will change all of them. Fingerprinting is how Asphyxia recognises the same person anyway.
This page covers what fingerprinting does, how reliable it is, and what to do if it catches the wrong person. There is nothing to set up.
What it does
An account is easy to replace. The computer behind it is not.
Asphyxia builds a profile of each player’s computer and compares new players against the profiles of players it has already banned. When a new account is recognised as the same computer as a banned one, that account is banned too.
It is a judgement, not a certainty
Two people can genuinely have similar computers, so a partial match means nothing on its own. Asphyxia acts only when a match is strong enough that coincidence is very unlikely. Weaker matches are recorded without action.
When Asphyxia does act, the ban record includes the confidence of the match and the Ban ID of the original account, so you can review the decision on the Bans page.
What you will see
[Asphyxia.] › ⚠ warn Possible ban evasion — this player's hardware is a 96.4%
match for banned license abc123… (their license: def456…)
[Asphyxia.] › ⚠ warn Possible ban evasion — this player's machine was
previously used by banned license abc123…Reviewing profiles
Every stored profile appears on the Fingerprints page, where you can search by license and see which profiles belong to banned accounts.
Privacy
Asphyxia does not read files on a player’s computer, does not look at which programs are running, and does not collect anything identifying them as a person. A profile is only useful for telling one computer from another.
If it catches the wrong person
Two people genuinely sharing a computer — siblings, a household PC, an internet café — can be caught if one of them is banned.
Lift the ban on the account wrongly caught, from the
Bans page or with asphyxia unban <banId>. The original ban
stays in place.
If that person later cheats, asphyxia reban <banId> restores their ban without
creating a second record. See Commands.