Nvidia A6000 GPUs flip memory bits if beaten by GPUHammer

The Rowhammer attack on computer memory is back, and for the first time, it's able to mess with bits in Nvidia GPUs, despite defenses designed to protect against this kind of hacking.

Last week, Nvidia issued a security advisory, telling customers about the possible threat, which was disclosed to the company and cloud providers in January by researchers from Canada's University of Toronto.

The researchers, Chris (Shaopeng) Lin, Joyce Qu, and Gururaj Saileshwar, describe their findings in a paper [PDF] titled "GPUHammer: Rowhammer Attacks on GPU Memories are Practical."

Scheduled to be presented at USENIX Security 2025 shindig in August, the paper describes "the first Rowhammer attack on Nvidia GPUs with GDDR6 DRAM." It focuses specifically on Nvidia A6000 GPUs with GDDR6 memory; newer GPUs like the H100 and RTX 5090 do not appear to be susceptible to this particular exploit.

In our exploit, we show for the ...