Rowhammer Attack Against NVIDIA Chips
A new rowhammer attack gives complete control of NVIDIA CPUs. On Thursday, two research teams, working independently of each other, demonstrated attacks against two cards from Nvidia’s Ampere generation that take GPU rowhammering into new—and potentially much more consequential—territory: GDDR bitflips that give adversaries full control of CPU memory, resulting in full system compromise of the host machine. For the attack to work, IOMMU memory management must be disabled, as is the default in BIOS settings. “Our work shows that Rowhammer, which is well-studied on CPUs, is a serious threat on GPUs as well,” said Andrew Kwong, co-author of one [...]