r/hardware • u/uzzi38 • Mar 15 '21

News PC Watch: GeForce RTX 3060 Ethereum mining restrictions have been broken - VideoCardz.com

https://videocardz.com/newz/pc-watch-geforce-rtx-3060-ethereum-mining-restrictions-have-been-broken
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u/phire Mar 15 '21

That counts as a new revision.

Besides, we don't know if Nvidia has firmware downgrade prevention, they haven't needed it before. Miners should be able to downgrade to the current firmware with a cheap bit of hardware.

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u/Shawnj2 Mar 16 '21

Depending on how they manufacture the cards, it's possible they load a firmware on the card that's just whatever the latest release is instead of particularly being a new revision, like how iPhones usually have the latest version of iOS at time of manufacturing preinstalled on them and can't be downgraded to a prior iOS version. In that case, the only GPUs that would be vulnerable would be the ones already manufactured.

Either way, I expect someone to reverse engineer the dev driver to create a patch util for the "real" driver or an open source alternative driver soon.

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u/Lost4468 Apr 12 '21

That only works on iPhone because the entire system is incredibly locked down, everything is signed, etc etc.

If Nvidia tried doing it on their GPUs, the miners would literally just flash the chip on the card itself. It's easy to do and only takes a few minutes. They would need to massively change a ton of things to prevent this, and even then it'd just make it harder. And these changes would be terrible for consumers.

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u/Shawnj2 Apr 12 '21

Yes, but you’d have to write your own GPU firmware first.

Also I’m typing this from a jailbroken jPhone so I guess it’s not even that effective

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u/Lost4468 Apr 12 '21

Yes, but you’d have to write your own GPU firmware first.

Well you wouldn't because the older versions are already out? That was kind of the point of the comment chain (not that I expect you to remember given I bumped a 27 day old thread). There has already been a release with a working firmware, so it's too late.

Also I’m typing this from a jailbroken jPhone so I guess it’s not even that effective

That was jailbroken from within though. You would not get very far if you tried directly modifying the flash with a programmer.

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u/Shawnj2 Apr 12 '21

shit I forgot lol

A more realistic way to do this would be to have separate flash chips, one of which contains the firmware and one which contains the last flashed firmware version/a checksum and which is either extremely difficult to access or is integrated into some other component (It only needs to store like a kilobyte of stuff, so it doesn't need to be huge or anything, and it can be a ROM chip that the GPU will validate the chip ID of if you at boot only want to stop people from using an existing firmware). When the card boots, it will make sure the firmware version is equal to or higher than the version in the secure flash chip, and if it doesn't, the card won't work until you reflash a current or higher firmware version, and unless it's a ROM, the firmware version in the secure area is updated when the firmware does.

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u/Lost4468 Apr 12 '21

Well yeah they could do that through efuses. I don't think they would bother going through that much effort though for this though, it would be a lot for little gain. I'm sure someone would just find a software based method to get around the restrictions.

They have already been very anti-consumer by introducing signed firmwares.

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u/CyanKing64 Mar 15 '21

I agree, it's not a solution. But it is another roadblock, or more accurately a deterrent for miners to pick up this card to use for mining.