GPUBreach Attack Exploits Rowhammer Vulnerability in NVIDIA GPUs
Severity: High (Score: 67.5)
Sources: Scworld, Wccftech, Bleepingcomputer
Summary
Researchers from the University of Toronto have unveiled a new attack named GPUBreach, which exploits Rowhammer vulnerabilities in GDDR6 memory on NVIDIA GPUs. This attack allows unprivileged CUDA kernels to escalate privileges and potentially compromise entire systems without disabling IOMMU protection. The researchers demonstrated that by corrupting GPU page tables, attackers can gain arbitrary read/write access to GPU memory, leading to a full system compromise. The affected GPUs include popular models like the NVIDIA RTX A6000 and RTX 3060, which are widely used in AI and gaming. Although the Rowhammer vulnerability has been known for over a decade, its extension to GPU memory represents a significant escalation in potential threats. The findings will be presented at the IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy on April 13, 2026. Users are advised that existing protections like IOMMU and Error Correcting Code (ECC) memory are insufficient against this new attack vector. The researchers reported their findings to major tech companies, including NVIDIA and Google, with NVIDIA considering updates to its security advisories. Key Points: • GPUBreach exploits Rowhammer vulnerabilities in NVIDIA GDDR6 memory. • Attack allows privilege escalation without disabling IOMMU protection. • Affected GPUs include RTX A6000 and RTX 3060, widely used in AI and gaming.
Key Entities
- Zero-day Exploit (attack_type)
- T1059 - Command and Scripting Interpreter (mitre_attack)
- Ampere Architecture (platform)
- Gddr6 (platform)
- Gddr6 Memory (platform)
- GDDR Memory (platform)
- Iommu (platform)
- CUDA (tool)
- GDDRHammer (tool)
- GeForge (tool)
- GPUBreach (tool)
- Rowhammer (vulnerability)