A new attack, dubbed GPUBreach, can induce Rowhammer bit-flips on GPU GDDR6 memories to escalate privileges and lead to a full system compromise.

GPUBreach was developed by a team of researchers at the University of Toronto, and full details will be presented at the upcoming IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy on April 13 in Oakland.

The researchers demonstrated that Rowhammer-induced bit flips in GDDR6 can corrupt GPU page tables (PTEs) and grant arbitrary GPU memory read/write access to an unprivileged CUDA kernel.