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> With a security-strengthened operating system, or with a VM/container/sandbox, it is possible to ensure that any opaque user-space program is no security risk
by hoistbypetard 4y ago
> With a security-strengthened operating system, or with a VM/container/sandbox, it is possible to ensure that any opaque user-space program is no security risk.
In theory this may be true. But the particular opaque user-space program is talking to a driver authored by the same team. That driver is talking to hardware that has access to all of the memory in your computer.
The odds are high that a userspace program talking to this kind of driver could make your computer do something you don't want it to do in a way that is very difficult to suss out just by reviewing the driver source code.
(I agree that an open driver is a great improvement over a closed one. But I don't think you can make any strong guarantees about the safety of the closed userspace portions of this one, yet.)
- RussianCow 4y agoI'm not sure why you were downvoted; this is 100% correct. Open source makes adding backdoors much more difficult, but I imagine GPU driver code is so complex that there are likely security flaws that even the entire open source community wouldn't catch. Yes, an open source driver is an improvement in many ways, but it certainly doesn't solve these problems because the attack surface is so gigantic.
- mjan22640 4y ago> has access to all of the memory in your computer You can use IOMMU to restrict the access to the appropriate memory sections.
- hoistbypetard 4y agoI don't think, for accelerating a desktop graphics card used across your entire desktop environment, IOMMU changes my argument at all. I believe it *does* help if, say your desktop's integrated video works natively and you have a second card you want to pass through to a gaming VM. Or if you have a server with no card shared between users and a one-card-per-user scenario.