NVIDIA say no to adding backdoors and killswitches in their GPUs

NVIDIA have released a blog post from chief security officer, fighting back against attempts from pundits and policymakers in governments wanting backdoors.

In the post, David Reber Jr. gives a firm no to the suggestion they should add in anything like a backdoor or killswitch into their hardware noting "NVIDIA GPUs do not and should not have kill switches and backdoors" noting that adding anything like it would be "a gift to hackers and hostile actors". Some words that perhaps the UK Government should take note on, with their repeated attempts (#1, #2 and so on) to get backdoors in encryption.

The post continues noting how a "good" secret backdoor just isn't a thing "only dangerous vulnerabilities that need to be eliminated" and ensuring that "no single-point vulnerability can compromise or shut down a system". It all seems so obvious to say doesn't it? But it clearly needs to be repeated as governments simply don't learn. A backdoor for one, is eventually a backdoor for everyone determined to access it.

Reber Jr goes on to give the NSA's Clipper Chip initiative from the 90s as an example of how it just doesn't work. There's more in the post worth reading but the ending note is especially blunt "There are no back doors in NVIDIA chips. No kill switches. No spyware. That's not how trustworthy systems are built — and never will be".

See more in the NVIDIA blog post.

In related NVIDIA news - there's a new recommended Linux driver out and they're working on some Linux gaming performance improvements.