Researchers disclosed GPUThor today, a GPU-based Rowhammer attack that targets GDDR6 memory on NVIDIA Ampere workstation GPUs. In their write-up, repeatedly hammering that memory caused bit flips that led to corruption, crashes, and, in one demonstration on an NVIDIA RTX A6000, a full compromise of the host.
They say GPUThor works on RTX A4000 , RTX A4500, RTX A5000, and RTX A6000 cards. It can also push error-correcting code, or ECC, past what it can reliably handle by forcing multi-bit errors, cases that may be detected but not corrected, or even silently corrected the wrong way. In the researchers’ testing, GPUThor was roughly 4,548 to 23,597 times more effective than the earlier GPUHammer technique at producing exploitable flips directly on the GPU.
If you’re running shared cloud, research, or high-performance computing GPU workloads, this deserves real attention. In the team’s tests, an unprivileged program was able to corrupt GPU page tables, turn GPU memory corruption into root-level access on the host, and also trigger GPU resets about every two hours. In some cases, it eventually went far enough to raise hardware-replacement flags.
The researchers say the findings affect NVIDIA GDDR6 workstation setups. NVIDIA recommends ECC along with input-output memory management unit, or IOMMU, and direct memory access, or DMA, isolation. The paper argues that operators may need more than that, including stronger multi-bit ECC, DRAM-level mitigations, close monitoring of ECC error logs, and tighter controls on untrusted GPU workloads.
Author: Anthony John Padilla
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