New Rowhammer Attacks Target NVIDIA Ampere-Generation GPUs

Two independent research teams demonstrated new Rowhammer attacks targeting NVIDIA Ampere-generation GPUs, enabling full system compromise by inducing GDDR bitflips to gain arbitrary read/write access to CPU memory. The attacks, named GDDRHammer and GeForge, exploit vulnerabilities in GDDR6 memory to manipulate GPU page tables or directories, resulting in privilege escalation to a root shell. GDDRHammer requires IOMMU memory management to be disabled (default in BIOS settings), while a third attack, disclosed on April 3, achieves root access even with IOMMU enabled on the RTX A6000. GeForge induced 1,171 bitflips on an RTX 3060 and 202 on an RTX 6000, demonstrating cross-component Rowhammer exploitation. The attacks affect NVIDIA GPUs, including the RTX 3060, RTX 6000, and RTX A6000, with proof-of-concept exploits providing unfettered host machine control.