Putting down the paranoia hat. Happy weekend.
Not sure you're familiar with defense update and release schedules. As long as this gets fixed sometime in the next 5+ years, everything will be fine.
Crippling use-cases is quite difficult: how could you distinguish at hardware/firmware-level object detection for fighter jets vs object detection for cars. Under the hood everything is just a bunch of compute units with extremely wide ALUs. I would even say, it's next to impossible to cripple "AI" without crippling graphics engines and most GPGPU kernels.
EDIT: Ah, you meant drivers. Yeah, that's perhaps more doable (since the OS can provide context on the calling application), also more detectable by the end-users: many people diff drivers to find patched vulnerabilities, security researchers would eventually notice it.
It's not a very good hat, honestly.
It's just nothing someone can just do. And there is also nothing which will prevent Nvidia to debug the ml issue and revert the change.
Hacking into Nvidias corp network, infiltrating their git server, disabling security scans and then injecting a backdoor undetected in complex code?
In a process which is highly controlled due to it being a very central peace of software.
Very unrealistic.
It's easier to find or buy zero days in the wild for the same goal
Actually smarter than that - they got into the build system and added the malicious code in the build process so you couldn't see it in the repository.
Do you think it's that difficult for a state sponsored body to infiltrate into a commercial company?
Big companies like Nvidia have background checks, independent security teams etc.
Impossible? No. But easier and cheaper is still other means.
https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/1848...
There is a double cross compilation method to detect if you are infected.