Nvidia chips become the first GPUs to fall to Rowhammer bit-flip attacks
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Summary
The Nvidia RTX A6000 graphics processing unit (GPU) has been found to have a vulnerability to a “Rowhammer” attack that could see data in its memory tampered with.
The attack works by repeatedly accessing memory locations in a specific row of a DRAM chip, which causes bit shifts in the data in adjacent rows, thereby potentially revealing previously stored data or introducing errors.
The discovery was made by a team of academics at the University of California, who also found a similar problem in GPUs from other manufacturers.
To protect users, Nvidia has released a mitigation technique that sacrifices up to 10% of the GPU’s performance, and recommends all users implement it.
Following the discovery, researchers estimate that Rowhammer attacks could become a serious threat to data centre operators.
