New Rowhammer attacks exploit Nvidia GPU memory to gain full root control of host machines; GDDRHammer and GeForge target Ampere-generation cards, achieving 129 bit flips per memory bank—64 times more than previous attacks—compromising CPU memory when IOMMU is disabled.

New Rowhammer attacks give complete control of machines running Nvidia GPUs

Both GDDRHammer and GeForge hammer GPU memory in ways that compromise the CPU. The cost of high-performance GPUs, typically $8,000 or more, means they are frequently shared among dozens of users in cloud environments. Two new attacks demonstrate how a malicious user can gain full root control of a host machine by performing novel Rowhammer attacks on high-performance GPU cards made by Nvidia. The attacks exploit memory hardware’s increasing susceptibility to bit flips, in which 0s stored in memo...