- Security researchers from the University of Toronto warn of Rowhammer -Error
- Older GPUs appear to be vulnerable
- Nvidia encourages users to update as soon as possible
Nvidia encourages users to use mitigation it gave against so-called Rowhammer attacks after new research confirmed their potential to cause serious and stealthy hardware level compromises.
Rowhammer is an utilization of a vulnerability in dynamic ram (dram), where repeatedly access (or “hammering”) a variety of memory can cause bit lashes in adjacent rows. As a result, threat players could bypass security limits, trigger privilege scales, data manipulation, or even denial of service states.
While this is a problem with hardware level, software-based techniques can trigger and weapons wrongly.
Newer GPUs are safe
Although Rowhammer -attack is known for more than a decade, Rowhammer -attacks have only been exploited in 2018, and even then – very rarely and in limited capacity – mostly because of their complexity and hardware dependents.
Security researchers Chris (Shaopeng) Lin, Joyce Qu and Gururaj Saileshwar, from the University of Toronto, recently published new research that demonstrated the practical use of the error:
“We ran Gpuammer on an NVIDIA RTX A6000 (48 GB GDDR6) over four dram banks and observed 8 different single-bit flips and bit flips across all banks tested,” the researchers said. “The minimal activation count (TRH) to induce a flip was ~ 12K, in accordance with previous DDR4 finds.”
“Using these flips, we performed the first ML accuracy attack using Rowhammer on a GPU.”
“ML-accuracy attack” means that Rowhammer was used to break down machine learning model accuracy from the usual 80% down to a depressing 1% using a single bit flip.
NVIDIA has called on users to activate the system-level error correction code limit that protects against Rowhammer on GDDR6 devices. Affordable works by adding excess bits and correcting single bit errors, maintaining data reliability and accuracy.
The list of affected GPUs is pretty extensive, and besides the RTX A6000, several Blackwell, Volta and Turing products include.
The full list can be found on this link – but newer GPUs come with built -in protection, Nvidia said.
Via Bleeping computer
