Lapsus$ in security - Hacking group threatens to leak NVIDIA GPU driver and firmware data, already selling GA102/104 LHR algorithm "bypass"

[Lightwreather]

Summary

South-America based hacking group Lapsus$ is threatening to disclose software and firmware data for Nvidia's LHR (Lite Hash Rate) mining performance limiter.

 

Quotes

Quote

The new information, gleaned from alleged screenshots from the group's Telegram activity, comes hot on the heels of last week's Nvidia hack - the details of which the company is keeping close to its chest. But the group appears to be confident in the quality of the stolen data, as they've already put up an announcement for the sale of data that could enable the bypass of Nvidia's LHR as implemented on the company's GA102 and GA104 chips.

 It is however interesting that the group is asking Nvidia to remove the LHR limiter by themselves, in exchange for a "HW folder" of stolen data not being leaked and distributed. Why the group would ask Nvidia to lift the mining limiter by themselves when the group claims to be selling an unlocker of sorts for most of Nvidia's RTX 3000-series line-up is unclear, and could cast some doubts on the legitimacy of the claims.

Lapsus$ seems to be doing what it can to pressure Nvidia to the negotiating table - whilst seemingly playing to the approval of the cryptocurrency mining community. The group claims to have stolen one Terabyte of sensitive information, including product schematics, driver and firmware data, documentation, private tools and SDKs (Software Development Kits), as well as "everything about Falcon". Falcon is a special class of microcontroller that ships inside all Nvidia GPUs, and takes on a variety of roles ranging from video decoding to memory copying - to security. Depending on the sensitivity of the stolen data, Falcon could thus be rendered an ineffective defense. The group claims that it still hasn't been contacted by Nvidia, and have in the meantime distributed part of the stolen data. Sources who have accessed said data have said it matches the group's claims.

 

My thoughts

So, a group has come forward to take responsibility for the alleged nvidia hack. And uhh, this is a bit sketch. Let's start with the most obvious: They claim to have something to bypass LHR yet demand nvidia give up LHR to not release the LHR bypass (There are other things, but ehhhhhhh, it's a non-descript "HW Folder" that is claimed to have private tools and SDKs but this is more fun to think of)? And that is their sole demand. What!? It just seems like they're desperate for attention, or something else. That being said they almost certainly have "something" but it's just way to suspicious. If they're trying to bait some people into buying malware, as the previous claim to fullly break the LHR limiter turned to be, well, that's something that is more believable. Welp, we're going to have to wait and see what comes of this, whether nvidia will even respond to this group's claims and so on.

 

Sources

Tom's Hardware

Videocardz

[CTR640]

Something must be behind this bullshit. I mean, how long has the LHR been around? And why now? "We decided to help the gaming and mining community" What the fuck are they even talking about?? Yeah no, probably extremely desperate for attention indeed because this is entirely nonsense.

[Levent]

What a shitty extortion attempt. Release LHR bypass for everyone, force nvidia's hand.

[KhakiHat]

I feel like I heard awhile back that there was already a couple work arounds for the LHR firmware. Even if there is some fundamental security flaw, nearly every PC part has a known or unknown flaw at some point.

[Blademaster91]

Hasn't the LHR firmware been around for a like a year now? If there was a workaround for LHR someone would've found it already, and this seems suspicious because the card BIOS is encrypted.

[GhostRoadieBL]

Nvidia will probably release LHR after the proof of stake change so they get a second round of empty market price hikes for 40series to release.

That's the slimy business move which makes the most news and the most restriction to second hand card sales being scooped by miners.

[Helpful Tech Witch]

There’s only one good thing that could come from a hack like this.

the bios signing and bios encryption keys, so bios modding could be a thing

[Kisai]

My prediction is that nVidia will come up with a LHR2 for the 40-series, where it will be something that can only be soft-fused off in data-center products, and will be permanently fused on in Geforce products. Like if nVidia wanted to prevent a second round of scalper idiots, they'd just make sure that the LHR mode is on by default and disengaged only if the card is running in PCIe 4.0 x16 mode and connected with a G-Sync Displayport monitor at native resolution. (eg the expected configuration of a gaming computer.) If the card is in PCIe 3.0 mode or the monitor doesn't have the G-Sync hardware, then it would just assume that it's not being used in a high end gaming system and has no reason to turn LHR off.

 

That said, the fact that they had to come up with LHR at all just points to how stupid the situation is. You're pretty much certain to pick up malware if you use any of these "hacks" from untrusted sources, and there will be desperate greedy schmucks who want to believe it's real, and suddenly find their cryptowallets emptied.

 

[mr moose]

2 hours ago, CTR640 said:

Something must be behind this bullshit. I mean, how long has the LHR been around? And why now? "We decided to help the gaming and mining community" What the fuck are they even talking about?? Yeah no, probably extremely desperate for attention indeed because this is entirely nonsense.

If they were genuinely interested in helping the gaming community they would have just left the whole thing alone,  IF they succeed they will only be helping miners.  Bunch of dickheads using BS excuses to be dickheads.

[AnonymousGuy]

3 hours ago, Helpful Tech Wiard said:

There’s only one good thing that could come from a hack like this.

the bios signing and bios encryption keys, so bios modding could be a thing

Really this is what I want.  Even with shunts, my 3090 can't go above about 750W and still hits Vrel limit.  Pretty sure there's a secondary current monitor somewhere in the firmware.  (there is no XOC / 1000W bios for 2 connector cards like the TUF.  It works but it disables one of the displayports and I need all of mine)

[Arika]

5 hours ago, J-from-Nucleon said:

demand nvidia give up LHR to not release the LHR bypass

that's a pretty stupid threat, it's literally the same end result. might as well make it harder on people who try to get around the LHR restriction then.

[rcmaehl]

Ok everyone, but wait there's more.

 

 

https://twitter.com/S0ufi4n3/status/1497456379665076224/

 

 

(credit u/Insaneleader12)

[WolframaticAlpha]

4 hours ago, rcmaehl said:

Snip

Nvidia is a Chad.

[Lightwreather]

7 hours ago, rcmaehl said:

-anip-

Now, that's just seething with irony. I mean, surely they can see that right?

…

Right?

[Dracarris]

Hmm all that LHR BS aside, I would actually be very interested in all those technical documents, schematics, source code and so on.. Just to see how the "big guys" in HW design do their daily business.

[Gamer Schnitzel]

NVIDIA is not going to care. They are the market leader in the GPU space and will remain market leader even if the AMD cards were faster next release. NVIDIA does not sell software, they sell physical goods and you all will be ordering their physical item at whatever high price they set it at irrelevant of whatever hacker group releases. They have no incentive to care about these people. Even AMD does not benefit from gaining this data because the backlash they would get if one single tiny piece of tech was found to be based on this hack would ruin them.

[Moonzy]

which 12 year old wrote the script for this BS of a show? 0/10 rotten tomatoes

[Phantom2022]

May all hacking groups come together and hack all Denuvo Software Solutions servers!

[jagdtigger]

19 hours ago, Kisai said:

or the monitor doesn't have the G-Sync hardware

Because having nvidia card is autmagically means you will have gsync monitor..... (Not really. BTW there are little dongles that can trick the card into thinking it has a monitor attached...))

[Spotty]

19 hours ago, Kisai said:

You're pretty much certain to pick up malware if you use any of these "hacks" from untrusted sources, and there will be desperate greedy schmucks who want to believe it's real, and suddenly find their cryptowallets emptied.

^ This 100%

 

18 hours ago, Arika S said:

that's a pretty stupid threat, it's literally the same end result. might as well make it harder on people who try to get around the LHR restriction then.

^ And this

 

As far as NVIDIA is concerned should they even really care if some hacking group releases a LHR bypass on some dark web message board? I don't think that's really much of a threat to them or incentive to remove the limit. I really doubt any serious operation is going to risk running sketchy software/drivers from a hacking group. The only people downloading some sketchy LHR remover would probably just be random garage miners who don't really know what they're doing and download whatever they see on the internet promising to increase their hashrate no matter how farfetched it sounds, and then only end up finding their computers ransomwared or wallets stolen. 

 

I think all this hack is going to do is cause a small spike in people being scammed by fake/malicious LHR removal tools with all the scammers taking advantage of people who might see this news and thinking that it might be possible to download some sketchy tool to bypass it. "New LHR removal tool 100% effective totally legit stolen from NVIDIA!! TotallyNotaVirus.exe"

[BuckGup]

Nvidia's solution is flawless. It helped boost the inventory to gamers and miners couldn't bypass the LHR....

 

Wait I mean it's all the scalpers fault and Nvidia is the good guy. Seriously though if a dude in his bedroom, assuming this is true, can do this why would anyone assume the LHR would work in the first place. Well I actually do know having worked at a corporate Fortune 500 tech company for awhile now and it boils down to corporate, which is a mask for the state of perpetual human greed. You need to make more money to make money in order for you to keep making money. I wish more companies had a CEO like Gabe Newell as he fundamentally understands things as the way they are and not how they want to view them. 

 

/Caffeine induced rant over

[LAwLz]

1 hour ago, BuckGup said:

Seriously though if a dude in his bedroom, assuming this is true, can do this why would anyone assume the LHR would work in the first place.

I don't follow your logic.

Are you saying that the limiter Nvidia put on hash rate is a hoax, and your evidence for this is that someone claiming to have access to the source code also claims that they can disable it?

[Kisai]

2 hours ago, jagdtigger said:

Because having nvidia card is autmagically means you will have gsync monitor..... (Not really. BTW there are little dongles that can trick the card into thinking it has a monitor attached...))

You're not telling me anything I don't know. The point was that the LHR obviously works or there wouldn't be people trying to defeat it. A next-generation GPU with it might make it impossible to defeat it by making "game" cards have no way or window to turn it off.

 

Having a Gsync (not nvidia's version of Adaptive Sync/FreeSync, but the actual "chip in the monitor" Gsync) monitor means that it's actually connected to a high end "gaming" setup. If someone wants to spend the extra $1000 for such a monitor just to turn LHR off, be my guest.  If you're connecting a a regular monitor or a dummy emulator, obviously LHR stays on by default. The fact that the gaming cards aren't even looking for a real monitor is part of the problem. Just doing a HDCP test would show the monitor isn't real (and would prevent tablet screens like those from Chinese vendors from working as primary screens, as they don't have HDCP either, and are technically not in spec as a monitor.)

 

Like I said the last time we had a discussion about LHR. There's many ways nVidia can make it so that  "gaming" cards don't get used as cheaper alternatives to their data center or workstation parts.

1. Require all 16 lanes to be connected. If the card can only hit 8 or 4 lanes (such as a thunderbolt expansion box) then it's not being used in a gaming pc. If it's only in a 1x lane, then it's definitely not a gaming PC. The GPU can do this itself by testing the PCIe bandwidth by talking to the CPU without going through the OS.

2. Require the monitor connection to actually contain a Gsync chip, test for other mandatory features of a high end monitor like 4K resolution, HDR and HDCP. IF IT DOES NOT SEE IT, IT NEVER TURNS OFF LHR. Of course if you're gaming, you don't need to turn LHR off, this is entirely for benchmark purposes.

3. Cripple CUDA support, only support Vulkan Compute when Vulkan is used as the render pipeline. Only support DirectCompute on Windows when used in a DirectX12 render pipeline. If you want raw CUDA, buy the workstation card, CMP, or data center hardware. Features that would normally use CUDA are then only usable by nVidia gameworks libraries.  No OpenCL, No SYCL, No C++ AMP.  For very obvious reasons this is a bad idea. But don't force nVidia's hand. Because the end result here would be that nVidia builds a lot more mining/datacenter parts at the expense of the gaming cards because they're more profitable. But doing this basically hands the gaming market entirely over to AMD. And maybe Intel.

4. LHR can only be turned off with a NVLink bridge (with another GPU) or terminator, CMP cards would have this pre-installed. LHR only turns off if all the cards can communicate over the bridge, no gaming cards have NVLink.

 

Or you know, people could just not be dicks about it so we don't need LHR at all. Too bad it only takes one rotten apple to spoil everything. 

 

[Rtms]

On 3/1/2022 at 10:46 PM, Kisai said:

Having a Gsync (not nvidia's version of Adaptive Sync/FreeSync, but the actual "chip in the monitor" Gsync) monitor means that it's actually connected to a high end "gaming" setup. If someone wants to spend the extra $1000 for such a monitor just to turn LHR off, be my guest.  If you're connecting a a regular monitor or a dummy emulator, obviously LHR stays on by default. The fact that the gaming cards aren't even looking for a real monitor is part of the problem. Just doing a HDCP test would show the monitor isn't real (and would prevent tablet screens like those from Chinese vendors from working as primary screens, as they don't have HDCP either, and are technically not in spec as a monitor.)

I don't get that. How a gsync monitor would actually unlock lhr? I am sitting on my gaming pc that has rtx 3080 ti master v2 connected to LG C1 that it has the gsync chip. I don't see any difference in lhr.

[Kisai]

48 minutes ago, Rtms said:

I don't get that. How a gsync monitor would actually unlock lhr? I am sitting on my gaming pc that has rtx 3080 ti master v2 connected to LG C1 that it has the gsync chip. I don't see any difference in lhr.

This is speculation on how nVidia might "turn LHR2 off" on new GPU's selectively. One way to ensure that LHR 2 can never be turned off is by baking it into the GPU die itself so that only the high end parts even have a soft-fused option to turn it off. 107,106 and 104 parts, won't be turned off by any means. 102 though (eg xx80/80Ti/90/90Ti) would look for a G-sync part on the display to consider turning it off, along with PCIe 4.0 and 16 lanes being enabled. 

 

Again, this is about making sure that a high end part performs as intended under benchmarks and games on a proper high end gaming system. If any of the above isn't true, then it assumes that there is no reason to turn LHR2 off at all, and any performance impact is never noticed except by miners and possibly edge cases with ML (who should ALSO be buying the datacenter parts.) 

 

Also I'd envision a LHR2 further crippling the potential hash rate to below that of the RTX 3060 on all parts, and against more algorithms (eg going after the "crypto" part) so the miners buy the CMP cards instead, seeing as they didn't get the memo the first time. nVidia has an incentive to keep miners from turning Geforce cards into mining cards. Scalpers on the other hand, likely would be disincentivized much faster when miners aren't the ones trying to buy every last card in every store.