GPUThor Rowhammer Bypasses NVIDIA ECC Protections
🛡️ Researchers from the University of Toronto disclosed GPUThor, a Rowhammer variant that defeats SECDED ECC on Ampere-class NVIDIA GPUs, enabling DoS and root privilege escalation. The attack achieves far higher bit-flip rates than prior GPU Rowhammer concepts by exploiting undocumented memory request coalescing and TRR behavior. Tested on RTX A4000–A6000 cards, GPUThor produced thousands of flips per GB and demonstrated both device resets and corrupted page tables leading to host root access. NVIDIA issued guidance recommending SYS-ECC, IOMMU/DMA isolation, telemetry monitoring, and restrictions on untrusted workloads.
