NVIDIA GPU Patch for Speculative Side Channels

http://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/4611

 

https://www.anandtech.com/show/1227...624d1dd2e3fffe&uid=35232353&nid=244+272699400

In the wake of Meltdown and Spectre essentially every major industry player has issued a security statement, and NVIDIA is no exception, especially as a hardware vendor. Their initial security bulletin last week disclosed that while their GPU hardware was thought to be “immune,” security updates to GPU drivers and affected ARM SoCs were forthcoming. Along with the standard updates and bugfixes, 390.65 brings some of those mitigations to the GPU display driver side.


Strictly-speaking, 390.65 brings a security update with mitigations for a variant of Spectre (CVE-2017-5753), and is applicable to GeForce, Quadro, and NVS products. NVIDIA did note that their GPU display driver is potentially susceptible to the second Spectre variant (CVE-2017-5715), and are working on a related future update. The reason for the Spectre-focused fixes from NVIDIA, despite the fact that these are GPU drivers and have nothing to do with the vulnerable CPU hardware, is that Spectre in particular is an attack that targets other programs and spies on their data via a side channel. Since the hardware problems allowing Spectre cannot be easily fixed, part of the industry-wide mitigation efforts include modifying critical software so that they can't be spied on by Spectre. GPU drivers in turn are especially compelling Spectre targets - and high priority fixes - since they have in-depth kernel access.


In any case, Tesla and GRID products are additionally affected; depending on the OS/virtualization platform, security updates for those are either already released or due to release by the end of the month.

 

I updated to the latest NVidia drivers today and experienced some graphic glitches in SotA. Invisible Weapons, invisible glyphs and some strange compass behaviors on the overworld map. Unfortunately i cant test more today. Just graphic issues i never had before...
Maybe someone noticed that stuff too and it can be backtracked to the new drivers ?