Nvidia Updates to combat Attacks??

elbmek · 08 Mar 2018

Anybody know the details??

Nvidia Updated Graphics Drivers to Defend Spectre CPU Attacks

The Meltdown and Spectre flaws, also known as CPU Speculative Side Channel Vulnerabilities technically, give potential attackers access to users' sensitive data stored in the protected kernel memory. As the leading GPU (graphics processing units) maker, Nvidia stated on its Security Bulletin that it believes its own GPU hardware is immune to the reported CPU flaws. As for its driver software, this company is providing updates to help mitigate this CPU issue. As of Feb.14, Nvidia has updated driver software for GPU products including GeForce, Quadro, NVS, Tesla and GRID for Windows operating system. Users can check the current version of the graphics driver on their computer and then download the latest updates asap.

Ben Hastings · 08 Mar 2018

Since virtually no information regards to what they really did to the driver is given in the bulletin, I believe this to be a PR stunt, aimed at making us believe that

they are aware of and are addressing the issue
whilst at the same time
assuring us that their hardware is not affected at all 'clarification that GPU hardware is not affected'

That being said, I have a working theory as to what might have happened

Assuming that the Nvidia GPUs are not affected, very few, if any changes were made to driver itself. This would explain why before and after benchmarks show almost no changes in performance
The application software that comes with the driver package would have to be re-compiled from source code, using a compiler that has Meldown/Spectre mitigations. For instance using Microsoft Visual C++ a compiler switch like /Qspectre or /d2guardspecload should be used.

elbmek · 09 Mar 2018

thanks Ben