GPUThor: an evolution of the Rowhammer idea
Brief
How can an industrial server be compromised through its GPU without leaving a trace? Such a complex, largely theoretical attack would typically leverage hardware vulnerabilities. This isn’t even about design flaws in the hardware itself, but about quirks in how it operates — sometimes at the physical level.
A recent paper by Canadian researchers at the University of Toronto describes GPUThor — a new and more effective Rowhammer attack that exploits precisely this kind of hardware behavior in video memory.
Rowhammer and graphics cards
GPUThor builds on the idea behind the original attack on RAM, first proposed in 2014 in the Rowhammer research . Rowhammer and every attack in its class rest on a simple fact: memory cells aren’t fully isolated from one another.