Rowhammer Attack Against NVIDIA Chips
Summary
Two independent research teams have demonstrated new rowhammer attacks against NVIDIA Ampere generation GPUs. These attacks can cause GDDR bit flips, leading to complete control of CPU memory and full system compromise. The attack requires the IOMMU memory management to be disabled, which is the default setting in BIOS.
IFF Assessment
This rowhammer attack allows for full system compromise by exploiting vulnerabilities in NVIDIA GPUs, posing a direct threat to system security.
Defender Context
This development highlights the continued threat of rowhammer attacks, now extended to high-performance GPUs. Defenders should be aware of the potential for system compromise if IOMMU is not enforced and investigate hardware-level mitigations or configurations that can harden systems against such memory manipulation techniques.