Rowhammer Attack Demonstrated Against Nvidia GPU

A team of researchers from the University of Toronto has demonstrated that Rohammer attacks against GPUs are possible and practical.

The attack method, dubbed GPUHammer, has been proven to work against a GPU from Nvidia, with the researchers using it to degrade the accuracy of machine learning models.

The Rowhammer attack method has been known for more than a decade. It involves repeatedly accessing — or hammering — a DRAM memory row, which can cause electrical interference that leads to bit flips in adjacent regions.

Researchers have demonstrated over the years that Rowhammer attacks can lead to privilege escalation, unauthorized access to data, data corruption, and breaking memory isolation (in virtualized environments).

However, until now, Rowhammer attacks have focused on CPUs and CPU-based memories. The University of Toronto researchers wanted to see if such attacks can be conducted against GPUs, particularly in light of their increasing use for artificial intelligence and machine ...