NVIDIA officials yesterday published a security bulletin confirming that their GPUs could be affected by at least one variant of the Meltdown and Spectre attacks.
These kinds of vulnerabilities that are being patched by different vendors and software developers also have indirect impact through some NVIDIA chipsets, which already offer their 390.65 driver to patch the Spectre variant that they have confirmed could pose a threat. The work, careful, does not end there, and there is at least one future patch to appear.
Upgrading drivers mitigates the problem
The Spectre variant (CVE-2017-5753) can affect products from the GeForce, Quadro and NVS families, and is the one that has been mitigated with this new driver that is already available for different platforms.
The company's managers are also working on mitigating the second variant of Spectre (CVE-2017-5715), and hope to be able to offer a new version of their drivers soon to solve the problem.
Updates to these drivers for your GPUs are not directly related to Intel, AMD or ARM CPU hardware, but the attack with Spectre can spy on other programs and their data through a parallel channel. Given that GPU drivers have access to the kernel in many cases, mitigating the problem on that side is interesting.