Nvidia’s Anti-Cryptomining GPU Chip Not as Successful as Promised
Nvidia, known for its gaming-friendly GPUs, announced that the upcoming GeForce RTX 3060 chipset includes efforts to protect against cryptomining, but experts remain unconvinced at its efficacy.
“With the launch of GeForce RTX 3060 on Feb. 25, we’re taking an important step,” the company said in a statement. “RTX 3060 software drivers are designed to detect specific attributes of the Ethereum cryptocurrency mining algorithm, and limit the hash rate, or cryptocurrency mining efficiency, by around 50 percent.”
The company said the RTX 3060 is still built to support “real-time ray-tracing, DLSS AI-accelerated image upscaling technology, Reflex super-fast response rendering for the best system latency” and other advanced, high-end graphics perks. Its important to note that performance has not been affected, rather the drivers will perform blocking-and-tackling in the form of throttling Ethereum-specific use. Ethereum (or Ether) is a cryptocurrency and platform – and represents the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, after Bitcoin.
“Simply put, Nvidia will try to detect the code you’re running, and purposefully…take out what amounts to denial-of-service (DoS) actions against software it thinks is trying to do Ethereum calculations on the GPU,” Paul Ducklin, researcher at Sophos security, explained in a blog posting. It’s a logical approach given that calculations used for mining Ethereum (the algorithm is known as “Ethash” or “Dagger-Hashimoto“) will have a unique signature that the drivers can easily identify, he added.
“Reports we’ve seen suggest that Nvidia’s anti-crypto drivers work by detecting memory usage that looks like an [Ethereum] computation, which needs to follow unusual but unavoidable memory access patterns, and cutting the speed of ETH hashing in half,” Ducklin said.
“Sadly, this isn’t likely to discourage crypto-jackers,” Ducklin said. “Even though these new Nvidia drivers will halve the earning rate of the cybercriminals, the crooks aren’t paying for the electricity (you are!), so any unlawfully mined crypto-coins are still essentially free money for them.”
It’s also possible that coders will come up with a workaround to the throttling, perhaps via a malicious update. “We’re also wondering just how long it will take for unofficial patches to appear for Nvidia’s drivers in order to bypass the ‘Dagger-detector’ slowdown code,” Ducklin said.
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