Voltage glitching unlocks A100 in mining card
The gist
Security researcher Kate used voltage glitching to turn an Nvidia CMP 170HX mining card into an A100-class GPU.
The work targets hardware fuses that software patches could not alter.
How it unfolded
- recentlyKate publishes a technical writeup on using voltage glitching to unlock the A100 in a CMP 170HX mining card and releases implementation details in the GA100VFI repository.
- recentlyShe converts a CMP 170HX 8 GB card into a GPU functioning as an A100 with 80 GB of memory, with all functional SMs (streaming multiprocessors) enabled, roughly 120-126 depending on the die.
- recentlyThe findings are disclosed to Nvidia's product security team ahead of publication, after another security researcher independently discovered the same vulnerability.
Key terms
- voltage glitching
- A brief, transient electrical fault deliberately induced by manipulating a chip's supply voltage to disrupt its normal operation.
- eFuses
- Microscopic fuses built into a chip that can be programmed once to permanently alter its internal circuits.
- SMs
- A specialized electronic circuit that accelerates digital image processing and computer graphics, and is also used for AI computation.
Source: Wikipedia