On Tuesday, Nvidia issued a security bulletin regarding updates it made to its driver software to address the Meltdown CPU vulnerability that’s had tech companies running scared for the last week. But in a Q&A this morning, Nvidia’s CEO was at pains to point out that none of Nvidia’s hardware is vulnerable to Meltdown or Spectre; instead, it’s Nvidia’s software, which runs on a computer’s CPU, that needed patching.
“Our GPUs are immune, they’re not affected by these security issues,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in comments noted by TechCrunch. “What we did is we released driver updates to patch the CPU security vulnerability. We are patching the CPU vulnerability the same way that Amazon , the same way that SAP, the same way that Microsoft, etc are patching, because we have software as well.”
“I am absolutely certain that our GPU is not affected,” Huang said, just in case anyone missed the point. Nvidia’s revised security bulletin also says “We believe our GPU hardware is immune to the reported security issue. As for our driver software, we are providing updates to help mitigate the CPU security issue.”
Meltdown and Spectre are two recently-revealed system-level bugs that affect the processors in virtually every PC and smartphone currently in circulation. The bugs theoretically would allow attackers to run code or read data without the requisite permissions, although processor manufacturers do not believe the vulnerabilities have been used in a real-world attack just yet.
