New Rowhammer attacks give complete control of machines running Nvidia GPUs

Two independent research teams demonstrated GPU Rowhammer attacks that let an unprivileged user gain full root control of host machines.

GDDRHammer targeted an Ampere RTX 6000 and induced about 129 bitflips per memory bank, while GeForge caused 1,171 flips on an RTX 3060.

Both attacks corrupt GPU page tables or directories in GDDR memory to obtain read/write access to CPU memory, requiring IOMMU to be disabled.