New Rowhammer attacks give complete control of machines running Nvidia GPUs

Researchers have demonstrated new Rowhammer attacks that allow malicious users to gain full root control of machines running Nvidia GPUs by exploiting bit flips in GPU memory hardware. The attacks target high-performance GPU cards—which cost $8,000 or more and are typically shared among dozens of users in cloud environments—by repeatedly accessing DRAM to create electrical disturbances that flip stored data from 0s to 1s. This represents an evolution of Rowhammer techniques first identified in 2014 on CPU memory, which attackers can now weaponize against GPU infrastructure to escalate privileges or bypass security protections. The vulnerability is particularly dangerous in shared cloud GPU environments where a single unprivileged user could compromise the entire host system.