If you've already put a piece of hardware into your computer made by nvidia, installing a kernel driver also made by nvidia does not increase your risk at all.
Installing some random anti-cheat kernel driver is not the same thing, at all.
But you are not installing a random anti-cheat kernel driver, you're installing anti-cheat kernel driver provided by a game you've already put on your computer. It's very much the same thing.
User space applications can't access hardware or physical memory. They can't bypass permissions enforced by the OS. None of that applies to hardware or kernel drivers.
> This isn’t giving us any surveillance capability we didn’t already have. If we cared about grandma’s secret recipe for the perfect Christmas casserole, we’d find no issue in obtaining it strictly from user-mode and then selling it to The Food Network. The purpose of this upgrade is to monitor system state for integrity (so we can trust our data) and to make it harder for cheaters to tamper with our games (so you can’t blame aimbots for personal failure).
Where did I say they are the same? We have a kernel-space thing (anti-cheat or gpu driver) and a user-space thing ((a game actually talks to both) that talks to a kernel-space thing.
I understood that you were making an analogy between installing a piece of hardware and its associated kernel driver with installing a game and its associated kernel anticheat.
When you install a hardware device you are trusting the manufacturer with full access to your machine, so installing a driver does not give them any more powers. You have already "unlocked the door".
When you install a game that runs on user space you are not trusting the vendor nearly as much as you are trusting a hardware manufacturer. Installing a kernel anti cheat is granting them a level of trust and access to your machine that they didn't have before.
> Most people do install Nvidia’s out‐of‐tree graphics driver
Most people that use Nvidia. I specifically don't buy Nvidia graphics cards or laptops that use them in my Linux computers because they're not in-tree.
- This is an abnormal case. Most hardware will work with in-tree drivers. Indeed, few vendors provide out-of-tree drivers for Linux.
- Nvidia is an established and reputable source. We aren't talking about some small hardware developer who doesn't have the resources to create secure drivers.
- Most Nvidia cards have in-tree drivers. There is a loss in performance, but the option usually exists.
It's a risk, but a very minor additional one - if you trust their hardware with direct access to your PCIe bus, you have already given them the metaphorical keys to the vault.
