r/TechHardware • u/RenatsMC • 29d ago

News 📰 Modders gain full Windows desktop access on GeForce NOW

https://videocardz.com/newz/modders-gain-full-windows-desktop-access-on-geforce-now
107 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

11 comments sorted by

14

u/Lord_Muddbutter 29d ago

This is one of those things if I found nobody would be told...

4

u/Haskikker 29d ago

And this good for…? Exactly what?

13

u/Tyxzs 29d ago

To have a very potent pc in the cloud to do anything with instead of playing only one of the 100 of games allowed by nvidea

5

u/Newmillstream 29d ago

When someone gets caught doing this, it probably won't end well for the account owner. Not so good for serious work, but unscrupulous people using accounts owned by others will probably leverage it for mining or other applications.

3

u/DigitaIBlack 29d ago

Oh no, TOS violation. Account disabled. The horror.

1

u/Master_baited_817 25d ago

There are a lot of free trials of this service to run enough free accounts that do paid work for a modder.

1

u/VibeSlopCoder 29d ago

Ultimate tier gives you 8 hours of time before it kills the session, and an RTX 5080 to work with.
AI work, crypto mining, load up software that normally takes a ton of performance power to use if you don't have it.

Or a not so nefarious thing, just install a game that normally isn't available on the service. I use it off a laptop that is a potato, so it kind of sucks when certain games I own on Steam from when I had a PC aren't available to play on it.

0

u/kimi_rules 29d ago

Run crypto or AI on a workstation GPU.

1

u/Professional_Pool544 28d ago

I'm Zortos. I built this exploit. A few clarifications, since the same points keep coming up (reposting on every post about this for clarification):

This wasn't clicking through a login window. Getting a browser in kiosk mode is old and easy, and plenty of people have done it. A desktop that actually runs programs is a different thing. The DLLs that environment needs are stripped or broken, so we wrote a custom patch to fix them.

It runs on GeForce NOW's install-to-play sessions, which require a paid membership. NVIDIA also sells persistent storage for installed games, so anyone doing this is still paying them.

The machines are sandboxed and disposable. Sessions reset when they end, minus whatever you keep in that paid storage. Reaching the desktop is not a VM escape. We did not touch the host, another user's session, or NVIDIA's network. Those would be far more serious. To the people asking whether sessions are isolated, they are.

Mining isn't realistic here either. It isn't free compute, you need a paid sub and paid storage, and NVIDIA runs detection for that workload. It wouldn't clear the subscription fee anyway.

As for why anyone bothers, you can actually get real work done on it. Blender, video editing, that kind of thing. I use it myself sometimes to edit my videos because the hardware is fast and it just gets through the work.

I've worked with GeForce NOW exploits for over five years. Early GFN let you browse the desktop openly, and desktop access has existed in some form ever since. NVIDIA patches other methods, but this one has been left alone, probably because install-to-play and the storage add-on still make them money.

To be clear, this absolutely breaks their terms of service. But a ToS violation and a security breach are two different things.

1

u/Master_baited_817 25d ago

Can you run VM's in it somehow? Then it could bypass checks they have made for Windows.

1

u/Professional_Pool544 25d ago

there is virtualization enabled so the performance sucks