tl;dr GPU drivers made by various vendors do not sanitize compute unit hardware scratch memory between uses, so you can just freely read whatever the last user left laying around when they stopped.
Literally too incompetent to follow even basic security 101 practices. A time shared device must be sanitized between users to prevent state leakage. There is no reason to believe that a security culture that clueless when developing a universally shared, high criticality device can be believed if they claim to do better elsewhere. Their process is either so incompetent or so inconsistent that their claims can not be believed without external audits.
These designs all come out of the consumer and gaming space. They correctly trade security away for performance. Blame whoever started running untrustworthy code on them.
These vulnerabilities will continue happening. What I don’t understand is how anybody can be surprised at this point. If anyone out there missed the first dozen instances of this: workloads on modern hardware can’t be isolated.
It depends on how the laws are written. Legislators are often wrong about tech.
But if you are saying Amazon and other cloud providers should be sued, I agree, companies that use parts not fit for the application they are going for should be sued out of business.
That said, the existence of the parts isn’t a problem and I hope manufacturers keep making high performance parts for those of us who don’t use them for crazy and inappropriate things. Manufacturers could be slapped on the wrist for selling their consumer chips as server chips, but I think this is less of a problem because anyone who falls for it is already a walking catastrophe.
Yeah it’s pretty insane that the entire AI hype and crypto hype industry waves are actually just getting really specific pixel shaders to sparkle in extremely specific ways.
The gear was made to frag noobs in Counterstrike at 300 FPS.
Jeez, I hope it did not require “security hardening” for Nvidia to do something this basic. If these other vendors missed some tiny corner resulting in state leakage, that would be understandable. But, forgetting to clear local memory is just inexcusable.
Imagine a OS forgetting to replace your general purpose registers across context switches. Only a rank incompetent and useless security process would let something like that get all the way through to deployment.
Vendors have consistently ignored multi tenant issues when coding because gaming doesn’t need it and cloud traditionally hasn’t used GPUs all that much.
You’d be surprised by how many security issues exist in GPU drivers
Could probably be that the shared memory (at least in the past) also was used for cache, so the same mechanism that probably sanitizer the cache is/was in play here.
Eventually for the product. My memory may be faulty but I talked with engineers working on it during development and I’m pretty sure the initial development was on Nvidia.
Wasn't too long ago that stray texture data would be left lying around from other processes, too. You could exploit that to read the contents of the user's banking tabs and stuff like that.
Literally too incompetent to follow even basic security 101 practices. A time shared device must be sanitized between users to prevent state leakage. There is no reason to believe that a security culture that clueless when developing a universally shared, high criticality device can be believed if they claim to do better elsewhere. Their process is either so incompetent or so inconsistent that their claims can not be believed without external audits.
In this case: Apple, Qualcomm, AMD, Imagination.
Edit: Added Imagination as noted by reply.