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WebGL Flaw Leaves GPU Exposed To Hackers
recoiledsnake writes "Google spent a lot of time yesterday talking up WebGL, but UK security firm Context seems to think users should disable the feature because it poses a serious security threat, and the US Computer Emergency Readiness Team is encouraging people to heed that advice. According to Context, a malicious site could pass code directly to a computer's GPU and trigger a denial of service attack or simply crash the machine. Ne'er-do-wells could also use WebGL and the Canvas element to pull image data from another domain, which could then be used as part of a more elaborate attack. Khronos, the group that organizes the standard, responded by pointing out that there is an extension available to graphics card manufacturers that can detect and protect against DoS attacks, but it did little to satisfy Context — the firm argues that inherent flaws in the design of WebGL make it very difficult to secure."
dupe dupe dupe
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgbK0ztUkDM&feature=player_detailpage#t=3195s is the video. In short, I asked the NaCl guy whether they knew what they were doing by letting NaCl clients access GPUs directly. His response was that they were doing everything WebGL does to protect the system from malicious code. That's unfortunately not sufficient.
~ C.
Welcome to "Everyone Else"—we're happy to have you as a member! Here's your complimentary iPad.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
This is nothing more than a scary article about the well-known risk of denial-of-service and using shaders to extract pixels from a remote image -- and the media is slurping it up, using senteces like "run arbitrary code on the GPU ... render an entire machine unusable". Ugh.
It's a completely over-hyped article about something the spec designers have known since day one. The article takes the fact that bad OpenGL drivers can crash a computer to mean a security hole, something which driver vendors are actively participating in resolving for future cards.
I wasted my time reading that whole report a few days ago, and it basically said nothing that wasn't obvious and well-known. The only thing new is they are showing that there is no way to stop GPU code from extracting pixels from remote images embedded in a canvas, which is a real "security" hole, though there's not a whole lot of use for this.
Basically, the extent to which this *should* affect webgl is that they will disallow textures from remote sites -- in other words, it could add an extra annoying implementation step for collaborative spaces that could include models from multiple sites. Also, they might choose to add an Infobar to prevent arbitrary websites from crashing the computer or making it run slowly.
However, thanks to the media slurping this up and using words like "run arbitrary code on the GPU", "render an entire machine unusable", etc., people who read these articles and know nothing about the subject (i.e. idiots) will start to ask browser vendors to turn those features off. But to be honest, I hope people aren't this stupid and "FUD"-y articles like these are forgotten.
Also, the title is plain misleading -- a denial of service attack on buggy drivers should not be described as "Leaves GPU Exposed". A website can not in any way take advantage of crashing a user's computer, and browser vendors will quickly respond with a blacklist patch when they learn of the affected GPU.
If you disagree with anything I said, feel free to comment and I'll explain in more detail why what the article describes are not "security issues" in WebGL.
Slashdot really should have published a link to this response from Mozilla http://blog.jprosevear.org/2011/05/13/webgl-security/
The key issue is: Putting your data in the hands of those you don't know is a uniformly bad idea. So is giving control of your computer's execution to those you don't know. There is no remedy for this kind of error, either -- once you hand your data over, you have lost control of it, and in turn, you have lost control over the consequences of random third parties misusing your information.
The good news is that we have a broad set of extremely powerful applications available to us that run well in the local environment. Word processors, spreadsheets, sound, image and video editors, music and video library engines, educational software and a whole host more are all very well populated with traditional applications, so for the thinking user, there is no need to "go to the cloud" for classic compute tasks. Instead, the net can be used for communications, both as its heritage dictates and as the most sensible domain fit, while personal data and execution permissions remain secure in and at the local environment.
To help protect yourself, I suggest beginning by disabling flash, scripting and use only CSS/HTML in the web-facing interface. As a side benefit, surfing is much more pleasant without pop-overs, flash ads, and many other corporate infections of the network.
Neither Google or any other corporation has your best interests in mind. Start from that understanding, and the world will make considerably more sense.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Can you promise that no SIMD scatter can be performed with offsets that it shouldn't?
Yes I can. For instance in ATI r6xx it can only go to a surface defined by SX_MEMORY_EXPORT_BASE/SX_MEMORY_EXPORT_SIZE described on page 127 here http://www.x.org/docs/AMD/R6xx_3D_Registers.pdf /usr/src/linux/drivers/gpu/drm/radeon and grep for VM_
In addition to that system memory is mapped to GPU via GPU VM page table, so only pages that were allocated by the process and that the kernel driver mapped into VM graphic context. See
So there are two layers of hardware enforced protection in addition to software command buffer parser that checks the addresses. Safe enough for you?