GPUThor breaks the error correction Nvidia recommended against Rowhammer

Last year Nvidia told GPU owners worried about Rowhammer to switch on error correction. Four researchers at the University of Toronto have now shown that the same attack, aimed harder, goes straight through it.

Their technique, GPUThor, is the first Rowhammer attack to defeat ECC on Nvidia GPUs. It works on four Ampere-generation workstation cards: the RTX A4000, A4500, A5000 and A6000. On each, it turns an ordinary unprivileged CUDA program into a root shell on the host computer, with error correction enabled. Chris S. Lin, Joyce Qu, Aditya Rajeev and Gururaj Saileshwar published the paper on 25 August. They will present it at ACM CCS in The Hague in November. Nvidia issued a security notice on 21 August. Bill Toulas at BleepingComputer reported the disclosure the following day; TechRadar picked it up on Monday.

The attack code stays private until 15 November. There is no patch, and the...

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