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Nvidia Hit by Major Cyberattack

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Re: Nvidia Hit by Major Cyberattack

#11

Post by ginko »

DRAGONERO wrote: post #2

The article lacks a lot of information unfortunately, but it makes it sound like the website (distribution channel) was the only part they are concerned about, which wouldn't be classed as major. What I'd class as major would be some third party gaining access to NVIDIA's RTL designs and source code for their drivers for current and unreleased GPUs, but this hack doesn't sound remotely close to that. Luckily.

Even if they get the RTL I'm not sure how useful those would be. While Russia does have semiconductor fabs, apparently their smallest node is around 65nm, completely useless for the large designs current NVidia GPUs use. At best they could have them made at a fab in mainland China, but even there the smallest node is only 14nm.

Re: Nvidia Hit by Major Cyberattack

#12

Post by ganzuul »

etiam wrote: post #10
amelius wrote: post #4

Russians?

Well, it has potential for a singularly unpleasant watering hole attack, few states have a blindingly obvious track record of it, and exactly one of those is in the acute phase of open acts of aggression warfare... Seems pretty clear what's the highest priority working hypothesis until the evidence is in. Number two could well be entertaining ideas about shaving a couple of items off their conquest list while the act…

Or all their talent made itself scarce when they saw the writing on the wall and what they have left is scriptkiddies who are capable of defacing a website when given a target to take down.

It's bad to underestimate the enemy, but also bad to overestimate them.

Re: Nvidia Hit by Major Cyberattack

#13

Post by ganzuul »

doubtfuluser wrote: post #7

Putting on my Paranoia hat: what if some aggressor indeed was able to introduce code into the Nvidia drivers, which - if put on enough systems - would cripple the ability to (re-)train Ai systems which might be used in military defense systems. What if - even worse - people decided to use Nvidia hardware in the inference systems as well… Putting down the paranoia hat. Happy weekend.

Picking up said hat, we can ask why they would duplicate functionality already in the hardware if they could just steal the keys.

It's not a very good hat, honestly.

Re: Nvidia Hit by Major Cyberattack

#14

Post by AlexAltea »

doubtfuluser wrote: post #7

Putting on my Paranoia hat: what if some aggressor indeed was able to introduce code into the Nvidia drivers, which - if put on enough systems - would cripple the ability to (re-)train Ai systems which might be used in military defense systems. What if - even worse - people decided to use Nvidia hardware in the inference systems as well… Putting down the paranoia hat. Happy weekend.

> would cripple the ability to (re-)train Ai systems which might be used in military defense systems.

Crippling use-cases is quite difficult: how could you distinguish at hardware/firmware-level object detection for fighter jets vs object detection for cars. Under the hood everything is just a bunch of compute units with extremely wide ALUs. I would even say, it's next to impossible to cripple "AI" without crippling graphics engines and most GPGPU kernels.

EDIT: Ah, you meant drivers. Yeah, that's perhaps more doable (since the OS can provide context on the calling application), also more detectable by the end-users: many people diff drivers to find patched vulnerabilities, security researchers would eventually notice it.

Re: Nvidia Hit by Major Cyberattack

#15

Post by tonmoy »

ginko wrote: post #11
DRAGONERO wrote: post #2

The article lacks a lot of information unfortunately, but it makes it sound like the website (distribution channel) was the only part they are concerned about, which wouldn't be classed as major. What I'd class as major would be some third party gaining access to NVIDIA's RTL designs and source code for their drivers for current and unreleased GPUs, but this hack doesn't sound remotely close to that. Luckily.

Even if they get the RTL I'm not sure how useful those would be. While Russia does have semiconductor fabs, apparently their smallest node is around 65nm, completely useless for the large designs current NVidia GPUs use. At best they could have them made at a fab in mainland China, but even there the smallest node is only 14nm.

A thief would be using the RTL to make a clone of NVIDIA graphics card, they’d be using the IP cores as modules in their own designs. With some minor adjustment it shouldn’t be too difficult to get at least most of the RTL working in a different mode (maybe lower clock speed)

Re: Nvidia Hit by Major Cyberattack

#16

Post by Melio »

pjerem wrote: post #9
Melio wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just a very very weird though. Sry but no one just hacks into Nvidias driver dev department and injects complex code to cripple ml training. It's just nothing someone can just do. And there is also nothing which will prevent Nvidia to debug the ml issue and revert the change.

AI aside, hacking into the driver’s build process to inject hidden backdoors into the drivers could be a realist attack.

Is it realistic though?

Hacking into Nvidias corp network, infiltrating their git server, disabling security scans and then injecting a backdoor undetected in complex code?

In a process which is highly controlled due to it being a very central peace of software.

Very unrealistic.

It's easier to find or buy zero days in the wild for the same goal

Re: Nvidia Hit by Major Cyberattack

#17

Post by ginko »

tonmoy wrote: post #15
ginko wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if they get the RTL I'm not sure how useful those would be. While Russia does have semiconductor fabs, apparently their smallest node is around 65nm, completely useless for the large designs current NVidia GPUs use. At best they could have them made at a fab in mainland China, but even there the smallest node is only 14nm.

A thief would be using the RTL to make a clone of NVIDIA graphics card, they’d be using the IP cores as modules in their own designs. With some minor adjustment it shouldn’t be too difficult to get at least most of the RTL working in a different mode (maybe lower clock speed)

>maybe lower clock speed

That is an understatement. 65nm is ten times larger than what NVidia is currently using. That means the area would be 100 times larger and any signal distances 10 times larger. And keep in mind that NVidia GPU designs already take up quite a bit of area on modern nodes.

So you'd likely have to cut it down to a 100th of modules which would run at 10th speed.

Re: Nvidia Hit by Major Cyberattack

#18

Post by lucb1e »

DRAGONERO wrote: post #2

The article lacks a lot of information unfortunately, but it makes it sound like the website (distribution channel) was the only part they are concerned about, which wouldn't be classed as major. What I'd class as major would be some third party gaining access to NVIDIA's RTL designs and source code for their drivers for current and unreleased GPUs, but this hack doesn't sound remotely close to that. Luckily.

> the website (distribution channel) was the only part they are concerned about, which wouldn't be classed as major

By whom? I'd certainly class it as major if their website could distribute malware instead of the real drivers, as that impacts everyone. Stealing nvidia's proprietary designs impacts only them.

I visited that page a few days ago to setup a new system which is, at the same time, supposed to be very secure (the proprietary drivers being one of the weak points indeed, but can't quite get around that if the GPU is to be fully functional). If this was compromised then I can start over and have a bunch of passwords and private keys to rotate.

Re: Nvidia Hit by Major Cyberattack

#20

Post by excalibur »

ganzuul wrote: post #12
etiam wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it has potential for a singularly unpleasant watering hole attack, few states have a blindingly obvious track record of it, and exactly one of those is in the acute phase of open acts of aggression warfare... Seems pretty clear what's the highest priority working hypothesis until the evidence is in. Number two could well be entertaining ideas about shaving a couple of items off their conquest list while the act…

Or all their talent made itself scarce when they saw the writing on the wall and what they have left is scriptkiddies who are capable of defacing a website when given a target to take down. It's bad to underestimate the enemy, but also bad to overestimate them.

It's bad to make so many powerful enemies.
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