Nvidia is implementing a hardware fuse system (a-la the Nintendo Switch) to prevent firmware manipulation. I can't speak to how secure these new cards will be, but the Tegra was an absolute pain in the ass to work with. It took a year before people even figured out how the firmware was loaded, much less how to interoperate between custom and official ones without blowing a fuse. To this day, approaching half a decade since the Switch's launch, you cannot coldboot the Switch into custom firmware.

Considering Nvidia's history with hardware DRM, I think there's reason to be scared. Plus, they've undoubtedly paid attention to the community as the Switch was exploited, and probably intend to further secure the firmware interface with what they've learned.

I think the big difference here is there is no money behind hacking the Switch, it's an interesting problem to a small(ish) subset of people. There's tons of folks that would make actual hard cash off those hacks which will make them much more invested in finding out how to work around the solution.

No money in video game piracy? What? https://jolt.richmond.edu/2019/02/09/the-unwinnable-war-on-v...

Eeeeeh, I give a lot less credence to that then I did when I was in college - back then it seemed like everyone was pirating everything (because, facts) but now a days a major consumer for video games is the millennials that have passed the cash vs. free time tipping point of piracy being attractive.

Also, reasonably priced services now exist - I used pandora when I was in college and enjoyed it even with how hamstrung and limited it was - now I use spotify and like... why even bother pirating music now?

Sure occasionally pirating a big title from Ubisoft out of spite alone is pretty attractive but I mostly just nab things off Steam and leave it at that.

Nintendo's anti-piracy efforts are so incredibly misguided - the hardware is the majority cost expenditure for most users and you've already collected that cost so why not try and make your platform not annoying. Allow people to mod games and run indy titles if they so desire. Most of this anti-piracy stuff is just lowering the value to the end consumer anyways.

I'm not really sure what you're arguing here. If you're trying to claim that piracy has no value proposition, then you're missing a market of people who maintain these torrents/sites with the hopes of archiving them for the future.

> Nintendo's anti-piracy efforts are so incredibly misguided - the hardware is the majority cost expenditure for most users and you've already collected that cost so why not try and make your platform not annoying.

Because they don't make money on the Switch. In fact, in the first few months of selling it, they were losing about $30 on every unit sold because of how expensive shipping was. Even today, the Switch runs a pretty thin profit margin, if any. Same goes for the PS5 and Xbox Series X, which gives you a pretty good idea of why these companies are so keen to keep an iron grip on software distribution.

>Nintendo's anti-piracy efforts are so incredibly misguided - the hardware is the majority cost expenditure for most users and you've already collected that cost so why not try and make your platform not annoying.

because the console makers make little (or more often lose) profit from each system, so the draw is to make up or it by selling software. first party software or 3rd party software they get 30% of sales from.

>Allow people to mod games and run indy titles if they so desire

Tell that to the poor PSP. The reality is that 1% use it to run emulators or make homebrew and 99% use it to run free games. To the ordinary consumers, these aren't general purpose computers to tinker around with, they are toys to entertain themselves with. They have computers and phones for the former.

You should check non-developed country.

Do game pirates make 10 million from hacking a game?

Because miners do.

It's certainly not for lack of trying. Fail0verflow, one of the largest and most successful CTF teams in the world, spent nearly 2 years trying to reverse engineer the bootloader, and ended up never finding any real security exploits in the process. There were warmboot attacks (see Fusee-Gelee) that involved code injection, but even then the machine would still recognize it was running in debug mode, and block the user from access to certain functions. Besides being a great anecdote here, the history of Switch hacking is really interesting, and well worth looking into if you have the time.

Hardware fuse? Trying to run custom software can actually brick hardware now?

The switch contains a lot of hardware fuses, with an instruction to blow one.

IIRC it's used (among other things) to set a minimum firmware revision - after upgrading to a new (signed) firmware it blows a fuse so you can no longer run an older signed firmware, which stops you rolling back to when a vulnerability still existed.

Not exactly, but it can be used to prevent you from running custom firmwares or reversing an update. On the Switch, each update would burn a physical fuse on the board, giving the OS a reliable way to determine what the latest update that Switch received was. Prior firmwares cannot be booted on a device with too many fuses burned, which is why the "1.0.0 Nintendo Switch" is going to become an increasingly hot commodity in the coming years.

e-Fuse. Samsung have been doing this for years on their phones. They tie it into their Knox system.

> approaching half a decade

So 4 years?

Reading the Nvidia announcement it's not a software upgrade, but a change in hardware. It only affects cards made after late May.

I still think it's pretty likely we'll see a work around, but if that work around is a custom made firmware patch (like it was for the driver update they deployed IIRC) then that will probably mean the chips you purchased have a less rosy long term cost as future driver updates won't be applicable to your altered firmware. If it requires any physical tinkering with the chip then it definitely increases the effective cost by forcing a labour/card cost and opening up the possibility of expected chip defect as you break some proportion of the hardware you purchase in the process of fixing it.

That all said - yea some people are totally going to hack that or my name isn't 46 DC EA D3 17 FE 45 D8 09 23 EB 97 E4 95 64 10 D4 CD B2 C2.

100% this in the short term, but in the long term workarounds will become harder to find. Have a look at iOS jailbreak history.

I just hope they don’t kill functionality which matters for other meaningful purposes, like deep learning.

There’s not money to be earned by jailbreaking iOS that increases in value the harder it is to jailbreak.

Yes, there is currently a ~$1m public bounty, probably more if you know where to look privately. You’d have to check your ethics at the door in both cases, but they do exist.

Nvidia did not say it will be a hardware limitation. In fact, they will almost certainly implement it in software. For example a "Lite Hash Rate" card will probably have a bit permanently set to 1 in the firmware/eeprom. The driver will read the bit, and arbitrarily enforce the restriction on such LHR card. This solves potential legal issues of retroactively crippling cards already out in the market, since only new cards sold from now on as "LHR models" will have the bit set to 1.

But miners will find another software hack (just like they did for the RTX 3060 earlier) to bypass the restriction.

IIRC wasn't that software hack based on NVIDIA accidentally releasing a driver version that supported the 3060 but didn't enforce the LHR?

They said that previously. Then they released an unlocked BIOS by "accident".