GPUHammer: Practical Rowhammer Attacks on GPU Memory
2025-07-16
Researchers from the University of Toronto have developed GPUHammer, the first successful Rowhammer attack against GPU memory, specifically GDDR6 memory in an NVIDIA A6000 GPU. The attack uses user-level CUDA code to bypass in-DRAM defenses like TRR, inducing bit flips across all tested DRAM banks. This allows a malicious user to tamper with other users' data in shared, time-sliced environments. A proof-of-concept demonstrated an accuracy degradation attack against a victim's DNN model, reducing accuracy from 80% to 0.1% with a single bit flip. While enabling ECC mitigates the risk, it can introduce up to a 10% slowdown for ML inference workloads on the A6000.
Tech
GPU Security