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I would like to ask a question about a strange incident that occurred as a result of using the StableDiffusion tool AUTOMATIC1111 (https://github.com/AUTOMATIC1111/).

Here's what happened: I used the mentioned tool several times to create images. Suddenly, my graphics card started causing system crashes. There was a black screen, a complete system freeze, and the graphics card fans went to 100% performance. Furthermore, it seemed that the firmware of the motherboard was somehow damaged. I realized this because the firmware suddenly reverted to an outdated version. The motherboard's manual describes this behavior as a fallback mechanism if the firmware is damaged.

I still considered it possible that it was a mere coincidence and simply a hardware fault with the graphics card. I then completely reinstalled my system and bought a new graphics card. Everything worked flawlessly. Game titles were completely smooth, in short, everything was perfect. Later, I reinstalled AUTOMATIC1111 (including everything needed for it, but I only used safetensor files!) and generated a few images. When I wanted to play games again, which had previously run super well, I noticed problems like significant stuttering, Vsync issues, performance degradation, etc. Other than the installation of AUTOMATIC1111, nothing had changed in the system at that time. I then did a fresh installation of the entire system again (including a firmware update of the motherboard) to check if the previous performance would return. It did not.

From here on, I had a very uneasy feeling. On the one hand, the defect of the first graphics card and now sudden inexplicable changes to the new graphics card that ran perfectly without AUTOMATIC1111. Since I'm not an expert in these matters, I would like to ask here whether you think it is conceivable that the mentioned software somehow attacked the firmware of hardware components and caused all these changes? If anyone thinks this is possible, could he or she tell me what I can do to check if my system is infected with firmware malware and how I can potentially remove it?

Additional note: I even once extracted the firmware of the new GPU and did a file size comparison with a firmware from https://www.techpowerup.com/vgabios/264881/gigabyte-rtx4080super-16384-231206-1. The files were identically sized. Is this a good sign and does it make a change to the GPU firmware less likely? Thank you very much to everyone who can help me with my questions!

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    Welcome to the community. Do you have dual BIOS on that GPU?
    – Sir Muffington
    Commented Jul 1 at 18:54
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    As far as I can tell, the tool you’ve referenced is just a browser GUI which uses standard libraries like Torch for the actual GPU tasks. I find it hard to believe that such simple high-level code hides an extremely powerful firmware exploit which somehow both affects your GPU and your mainboard. A harmless explanation like overheating or maybe a bug seems more likely. I would factory-reset the components, collect some hard facts about any remaining issues, report those to the vendor support and, if necessary, RMA the hardware.
    – Ja1024
    Commented Jul 1 at 22:40
  • @ Sir Muffington : Yes, it has dual BIOS, and I already switched back and forth, but I did not notice any difference with respect to the mentioned performance issues.
    – Dennis Muend
    Commented Jul 2 at 6:56
  • @Ja1024: Thanks for you comment. Indeed, it was quite conceivable to me that such a complex attack could take place in this way, since the effort and benefit hardly seem proportional. As for the attack vectors, in this case, I primarily thought of certain files (.pth) that can contain 'pickles,' which are necessary to run the tool.
    – Dennis Muend
    Commented Jul 2 at 7:27
  • @DennisMuend: .pth files are serialized PyTorch models which have nothing to do with the GPU firmware. It’s definitely imaginable that there’s an exploit that attacks your local user account – deserialization is notoriously risky and can lead to code execution vulnerabilities. But this doesn’t affect your GPU.
    – Ja1024
    Commented Jul 3 at 5:41

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I have used automattic1111 in a google Collab with the default model but I haven't personally downloaded it to my machine. The model you use is most often saved as a pickle, these can vary on your use case. A pickle file is basically a stack of instructions or opcodes. It's not human readable and It's possible that dangerous arbitrary code can execute when you load a pickle file. I suggest loading models only from users and organizations you trust. If you used another model again there is a script designed to scan a directory and its subdirectories for malicious pickle files called pickletool, download it from source on both hugging face and GitHub.

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