LAS VEGAS, NV -- Nvidia announced that it updated its GPU drivers against the recently discovered Spectre and Meltdown CPU flaws.
Nvidia GPUs Are Immune
Nvidia said that its software, like any other software that runs on the flawed CPUs, can also be vulnerable to the two CPU bugs. The update will make it difficult for attackers to exploit Nvidia's driver software when running on machines with the vulnerable CPUs.
Nvidia made it clear that the GPUs themselves are not susceptible to the Meltdown or Spectre attacks. Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang, said the following:
Our GPUs are immune, they are not affected by these security issues. What we did was released driver updates to patch CPU security vulnerabilities. We are patching the CPU vulnerabilities in the same way Amazon will, Epic, and Microsoft, because we have software, too.Anyone who writes software has to patch. So we have to patch our drivers to patch the CPU vulnerabilities. I am absolutely certain our GPU is not affected.
Drivers Get Updated
There are three variants of the bugs in total, two for Spectre and one for Meltdown. A patch for the first variant of Spectre (CVE-2017-5753) is included in today’s update. Nvidia said that its initial analysis concluded that updating the second Spectre variant (CVE-2017-5715) will require more investigation. The company noted that it doesn’t believe its software is vulnerable to Meltdown at this time.
Updated Products
Nvidia released updates to GeForce, Quadro, NVS drivers, Tesla drivers, and Grid drivers. Consumers can download the updates from Nvidia’s driver download page. Enterprise customers of Nvidia’s Grid service should visit the Nvidia Licensing Center. DGX-1 or DGX Station should visit the Nvidia Enterprise portal.
