A hacker group has reportedly stolen Nvidia’s DLSS source code

A hacker group has reportedly claimed responsibility for last week’s Nvidia cyber attack and the source code for the company’s popular DLSS technology could be among the data allegedly stolen.

TechPowerUp claims to have received an image from an anonymous source claiming to show the C++ files, headers and assets that make up DLSS. “Our tipsters who sent this screenshot are examining the code to see the inner workings of DLSS,” it states.

It’s been claimed by various sources, including TechPowerUp, that the LAPSUS$ hacking group has claimed responsibility for the hack, and that it claims to have stolen around 1TB of data from America’s largest microchip company, including schematics, drivers and firmware data.

It’s claimed that the group has now released part of their files to the public in form of a 75GB download encompassing over 400,000 files. According to images circulating on social media, this includes employees’ passwords.

The leak has not been independently verified by VGC and Nvidia has not commented publicly on the latest claims.

If accurate, the leak could reveal the secrets behind the popular DLSS upscaling tech and empower community creators to bring the feature to other platforms such as Linux.

While rival graphics firms AMD and Intel, which have launched their own DLSS alternatives in MD FSR and Intel XeSS, would also no doubt be keen to see any leaked files, incorporating any learnings into their own products would certainly lead to legal consequences.

DLSS (deep learning super sampling) is a feature exclusive to Nvidia’s RTX graphics cards and works by using AI to upscale the resolution of PC games, effectively allowing players to achieve higher graphical settings and better frame rates from their systems.

According to a Digital Foundry analysis, DLSS 2.0 at any normal screen distance “looks almost as good as the real thing.”

To date, Nvidia has not indicated any plans to make its DLSS technology open source, or allowed it to be licensed to competing graphics card firms.

Last week a report published by The Telegraph (paywalled) claimed that Nvivia had seen parts of its business taken offline for days following a suspected cyber attack.

According to the report, what’s believed to be a malicious network intrusion “completely compromised” Nvidia’s internal systems including email and developer tools, which suffered from outages since the middle of the week.

An Nvidia spokesman told the publication at the time that it was “investigating an incident” and “we don’t have any additional information to share at this time.”

According to TechPowerUp, the LAPSUS$ group that claims responsibility for the breach is threatening to “help mining and gaming community” by releasing a bypass solution for Nvidia’s Lite Hash Rate (LHR), which puts strict limits on the crypto mining performance of select GPUs.