New Rowhammer attacks give complete control of machines running Nvidia GPUs
Summary
Ars Technica reports on two new Rowhammer attacks, GDDRHammer and GeForge, that compromise memory on Nvidia Ampere GPUs (e.g., RTX 3060 and RTX 6000) by manipulating GPU page tables. The attacks enable reading and writing host memory, potentially giving an attacker root access when IOMMU is disabled, with memory massaging techniques used to bypass protections. Mitigations include enabling IOMMU and ECC, and awareness that newer GPUs may be affected as research progresses.