GPUHammer: Rowhammer Attacks on GPU Memories are Practical

Chris S. Lin, Joyce Qu, Gururaj Saileshwar

34th USENIX Security Symposium · Day 1

The USENIX Security paper "GPUHammer: Rowhammer Attacks on GPU Memories are Practical" unveils a groundbreaking discovery: the first successful **Rowhammer attack** against discrete NVIDIA GPUs utilizing **GDDR6 DRAM**. Authored by Chris S. Lin, Joyce Qu, and Gururaj Saileshwar from the University of Toronto, this research addresses a critical gap in hardware security, extending the well-known Rowhammer vulnerability from traditional CPU-based DDR/LPDDR memories to the high-performance memory architectures of modern GPUs. With GPUs forming the backbone of emerging machine learning (ML) and high-performance computing (HPC) applications, understanding and mitigating such vulnerabilities is paramount for ensuring the integrity and security of these critical systems.

AI review

This is the real deal — first practical Rowhammer on discrete GPUs, with clean reverse-engineering work, a novel multi-warp hammering technique that actually matters, and an end-to-end exploit that tanks ML model accuracy. The kind of paper that opens a new attack surface and forces vendors to respond.