New Rowhammer attacks on Nvidia GPUs achieve full system control
Original: New Rowhammer attacks give complete control of machines running Nvidia GPUs
Why This Matters
First demonstration of GPU Rowhammer attacks achieving full system compromise
Security researchers demonstrated three new Rowhammer attacks targeting Nvidia GPU memory that can give attackers complete root control of host machines. The attacks exploit bit flips in GDDR memory to compromise CPU memory and achieve full system takeover.
Two independent research teams revealed attacks called GDDRHammer, GeForge and GPUBreach that exploit Rowhammer vulnerabilities in Nvidia's Ampere generation GPUs. Unlike previous GPU Rowhammer research that achieved only eight bitflips with limited damage, these new attacks can flip bits in GDDR memory to gain arbitrary read/write access to CPU memory, resulting in complete machine compromise. The attacks work by hammering GPU memory rows to create electrical disturbances that flip bits from 0 to 1. For most attacks to succeed, IOMMU memory management must be disabled, which is the default BIOS setting. However, one attack called GPUBreach reportedly works even with IOMMU enabled. The vulnerability is particularly concerning for cloud environments where expensive GPUs costing $8,000+ are shared among multiple users.