'Our work shows that Rowhammer, which is well-studied on CPUs, is a serious threat on GPUs as well': High-end Nvidia hardware targeted by all-new attacks entering a new "territory."

Date:
Wed, 08 Apr 2026 19:35:00 +0000

Description:
New Rowhammer attacks on Nvidia GPUs enable full system compromise by manipulating memory, exposing risks in shared environments despite limited real-world use.

FULL STORY ======================================================================Copy link Facebook X Whatsapp Reddit Pinterest Flipboard Threads Email Share this article 0 Join the conversation Follow us Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter Tech Radar Pro Are you a pro? Subscribe to our newsletter Sign up to the TechRadar Pro newsletter to get all the top news, opinion, features and guidance your business needs to succeed! Become a Member in Seconds Unlock instant access to exclusive member features. Contact me with news and offers from other Future brands Receive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsors By submitting your information you agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy and are aged 16 or over. You are
now subscribed Your newsletter sign-up was successful Join the club Get full access to premium articles, exclusive features and a growing list of member rewards. Explore An account already exists for this email address, please log in. Subscribe to our newsletter Rowhammer attacks now extend beyond CPUs into high-performance GPUs GPU memory manipulation enables direct access to CPU memory systems New attacks achieve full system compromise through controlled bit flips Rowhammer has been a known issue on CPU-facing DRAM for more than a decade, but the same weaknesses now apply to high-performance GPUs with potentially similar consequences.

The attacks show that an attacker can induce bit flips on the GPU to gain arbitrary read and write access to all of the CPU's memory. Three research teams, working independently, revealed that Nvidia 's Ampere generation
cards, including the RTX 3060 and RTX 6000 models, are vulnerable to these attacks. Article continues below You may like GPU price hikes are getting out of hand going by a new report Rumor claims Nvidia won't have any new gaming GPUs in 2026 Micron reveals faster video RAM that we might see in Nvidia RTX 6000 GPUs What the new attacks actually do Our work shows that Rowhammer, which is well-studied on CPUs, is a serious threat on GPUs as well, said Andrew Kwong, co-author of one of the papers.

With our work, we show how an attacker can induce bit flips on the GPU to
gain arbitrary read and write access to all of the CPUs memory, resulting in complete compromise of the machine.

The first attack, called GDDRHammer, induces an average of 129 bit flips per memory bank on the RTX 6000.

This represents a 64-fold increase compared to previous GPU Rowhammer
attempts documented last year. Are you a pro? Subscribe to our newsletter
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The second attack, named GeForge and authored by Zhenkai Zhang and his team, achieved 1,171 bit flips against the RTX 3060 and 202 bit flips against the RTX 6000.

Both attacks use novel hammering patterns and a technique called memory massaging to corrupt GPU page tables.

Once the page tables are corrupted, an attacker can gain arbitrary read and write access to the GPU's memory space, and from there, can also access the host CPU's memory, leading to complete system compromise. What to read next Rumor: Nvidia has 'essentially killed off' RTX 5070 Ti and 5060 Ti 16GB GPU Nvidia could drop GPU production by up to 20%, rumor claims Zotac warns that graphics card makers could be wiped out by RAM crisis

A third attack called GPUBreach takes a different and more concerning approach. It exploits memory safety bugs in the Nvidia driver itself rather than relying solely on bit flips.

The researchers behind GPUBreach explained that by corrupting GPU page
tables, an unprivileged CUDA kernel can gain arbitrary GPU memory read and write access.

GPUBreach corrupts metadata within permitted buffers, causing out-of-bounds writes that the attacker controls - the result is a root shell on the host machine without requiring any special hardware configuration.

Enabling IOMMU closes the vulnerability against GDDRHammer and GeForge but fails against GPUBreach, even when enabled in the BIOS.

IOMMU is disabled by default in most systems because enabling it reduces performance, and many administrators leave it disabled for this reason.

However, enabling Error Correcting Codes on the GPU provides some protection against all three attacks.

Both mitigations incur a performance penalty because they reduce available workable memory.

The researchers note that only Ampere generation cards from 2020 have been tested - so newer generations may also be vulnerable, but academic research typically lags behind product rollouts.

There are no known instances of Rowhammer attacks being used in the wild, which limits the immediate practical threat.

However, GPUBreach working with IOMMU enabled is particularly troubling for cloud storage providers that share expensive GPU resources among multiple customers.

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