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GPUHammer: Rowhammer attacks on GPU memories are practical


: Rowhammer Attacks on GPU Memories are Practical # Chris (Shaopeng) Lin†, Joyce Qu†, Gururaj Saileshwar, from University of Toronto Published at USENIX Security 2025 (link to paper). Artifact available on GitHub and Zenodo.

Unlike CPUs, NVIDIA GPUs do not expose the physical addresses to user-level CUDA code, making it challenging to identify and hammer DRAM rows in the same bank. Based on this insight, we show that in a time-shared GPU setup, an attacker can position victim data into vulnerable DRAM rows via memory massaging and force the bit flips at such locations. Other GDDR6 GPUs, such as the RTX 3080, did not show bit flips in our tests, possibly due to variations in DRAM vendor, chip characteristics, or operating conditions like temperature.

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