Another Rowhammer attack has been detected, and Nvidia workstation GPUs are firmly in the firing line
- GPUThor is the first Rowhammer attack to defeat ECC on Nvidia GPUs and reach a root shell on the host
- It affects four Ampere workstation cards with GDDR6 memory, the RTX A4000, A4500, A5000 and A6000
- Non-uniform hammering, enabled by defeating GPU memory coalescing and finding that Target Row Refresh (TRR) mitigations fire once every 72 refresh intervals, delivers effectively 6.6 times the hammering intensity of prior attacks
Four researchers at the University of Toronto have disclosed GPUThor, a Rowhammer technique that breaks the error correction Nvidia has spent the past year recommending as the defense against exactly this class of attack.
Chris S. Lin, Joyce Qu, Aditya Rajeev and Gururaj Saileshwar are expected to present the paper outlining their approach and subsequent findings at ACM CCS 2026.
The attacks target Ampere-generation workstation cards with GDDR6 memory, specifically the RTX A4000, A4500, A5000 and A6000, and it turns an unprivileged...
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