Nvidia’s Mental Ray high-performance 3D-rendering software has a vulnerability that could be exploited to compromise clusters of specialized computers called render farms, according to researchers from ReVuln.”There is a vulnerability affecting Nvidia mental ray (raysat) version 3.11.1.10, which allows a malicious user to load arbitrary DLLs on a victim system, thus an attacker can take control over a whole render farm by simply injecting a malicious remote library,” said Luigi Auriemma and Donato Ferrante, security researchers and founders of Malta-based vulnerability research ReVuln, Tuesday in a research paper.The Nvidia Mental Ray can use CUDA-enabled consumer or professional GPUs like the Nvidia GeForce, Quadro, and Tesla models for parallel rendering.It’s commonly used in the film industry for CGI (computer-generated imagery) effects, but also in industries that rely on computer-aided design (CAD).Mental Ray is available as a stand-alone application for Windows, Mac, and Linux that can be installed and used on dedicated render machines.

However, it is also integrated into third-party software like Autodesk 3ds Max, Autodesk Maya, Cinema 4D, and others.A render farm’s computing power varies depending on its size.Industrial Light & Magic, an American visual effects company, used a render farm with access to 5,700 processor cores when it worked on the Transformers 2 movie in 2009.On Windows, Nvidia Mental Ray runs as a system service and listens for incoming connections on port 7520, the ReVuln researchers said.To exploit the vulnerability, an attacker just needs to send a malicious packet to the affected systems from a compromised computer on the same network, they said.Post-exploitation scenarios could include using compromised render farms for password cracking or mining bitcoins, since both tasks can be distributed across many GPUs, the researchers said.An example of a malicious packet that triggers the vulnerability in the Mental Ray software was included in ReVuln’s research paper, but the company did not report the issue to Nvidia.

ReVuln discloses the vulnerabilities found by its researchers publicly or sells the information to third parties through a subscription-based vulnerability intelligence service.Nvidia did not immediately respond to a request for comment.To comment on this article and other PCWorld content, visit our Facebook page or our Twitter feed.litecoin gpu hashrateNvidia and AMD stepping into the mining chip game at long last!litecoin mining blog(self.Bitcoin)submitted by Seems like Nvidia and AMD are stepping up efforts to make dedicated GPU's for mining.circle bitcoin selfieHopefully this is the first step towards getting rid of Bitmain's monopoly and Jihan Wu fading away into a bad memory.bitcoin 51 percent problem

π Rendered by PID 14387 on app-521 at 2017-06-24 12:37:09.781885+00:00 running 3522178 country code: SG.Introducing The GM107 GPU, Based On Maxwell Nvidia's GeForce GTX 750 Ti Reference Card MSI GTX 750 Ti Gaming OC Gigabyte GTX 750 Ti Windforce OC Zotac GTX 750 Ti Test Setup And Benchmarks Results: Arma 3 Results: Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag Results: Battlefield 4 Results: BioShock Infinite Results: Far Cry 3 Results: Grid 2 Results: Metro: Last Light Average Performance And Performance Per Watt GPU Boost And Overclocking GPGPU: Floating-Point Performance GPGPU: Bitcoin, Litecoin, LuxMark, And RatGPU Professional Applications Temperatures And Acoustics Power Consumption: Gaming Power Consumption: Idle, Compute, And More Crazy Performance For A 60 W Card GPGPU: Bitcoin, Litecoin, LuxMark, And RatGPU The following disciplines don't capture every aspect of general-purpose computing (there are still Photoshop, WinZip, and video editing benchmarks in our suite that we weren't able to run).bitcoin mining nvidia linux

Nevertheless, they give us a good idea of how Maxwell improves upon the Kepler architecture, and where Nvidia now sits relative to AMD.BTC Mining Although the company isn't going into depth on the improvements it made, we know that Maxwell handles hashing far better than Kepler, which is reflected by its victory over the GeForce GTX 680 and 770.bitcoin miner for chromeAt least in BTC mining, however, GeForce GTX 750 Ti still gets hammered by Radeon R7 260X and some of AMD's other more mainstream cards.Of course, Bitcoin isn't the only cryptocurrency reliant on hashing.MaxCoin, for example, is a member of the SHA3 family, and it's supported in the latest version of CudaMiner.Curious as to how GeForce GTX 750 Ti sizes up to 650 Ti, we ran the following SHA2-based test in Sandra 2014: There are big gains to be had from DirectX's Compute Shader, but throughput via CUDA is downright phenomenal.It's probable that Maxwell improves some of the integer operations that were slower on Kepler.

Hopefully Nvidia opens up more about what the new architecture can do.LTC Mining Bitcoin mining is almost irrelevant to CPU and GPU miners these days, if only because it's impossible to compete with dedicated ASIC- and FPGA-based devices working so much faster.But at least for a short time still, Litecoins remain at least a somewhat viable option.The use of scrypt (a password-based key derivation function) in their proof-of-work algorithm, rather than Bitcoin's SHA-256, makes dedicated hardware more difficult to develop.So, GPUs still rule, even if increasing difficulties make the investment in equipment and power greater than current returns.Historically, Nvidia's cards came up short against competing Radeons, which is why you see R9 290X boards selling for $700 and up.But the Maxwell architecture's improvements allow the 60 W GeForce GTX 750 Ti to outperform the 140 W GeForce GTX 660 and approach AMD's 150 W Radeon R7 265, which just launched, still isn't available yet, but is expected to sell for the same $150.

On a scale of performance (in kH/s) per watt, that puts Nvidia way out ahead of AMD.Today, four GM107-based cards in a mining rig should be able to outperform a Radeon R9 290X for less money, using less power.LuxMark 2.0 LuxMark is another bastion for AMD, where the compute performance of its GPUs typically dwarfs competing Nvidia cards.The Radeons are so much faster, in fact, that Nvidia typically avoids addressing our results, stating only that it doesn't optimize for compute workloads on its gaming cards.Again though, for a 60 W board, the GeForce GTX 750 Ti does pretty well.It still falls behind the Bonaire-based cards in its price segment.But compare its score of 943 to the GeForce GTX 580's 893.That's an almost-250 W former flagship!RatGPU Introducing The GM107 GPU, Based On Maxwell Nvidia's GeForce GTX 750 Ti Reference Card MSI GTX 750 Ti Gaming OC Gigabyte GTX 750 Ti Windforce OC Zotac GTX 750 Ti Test Setup And Benchmarks Results: Arma 3 Results: Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag Results: Battlefield 4 Results: BioShock Infinite Results: Far Cry 3 Results: Grid 2 Results: Metro: Last Light Average Performance And Performance Per Watt GPU Boost And Overclocking GPGPU: Floating-Point Performance GPGPU: Bitcoin, Litecoin, LuxMark, And RatGPU Professional Applications Temperatures And Acoustics Power Consumption: Gaming Power Consumption: Idle, Compute, And More Crazy Performance For A 60 W Card