GPUThor Rowhammer Attack Bypasses ECC on NVIDIA RTX A6000 to Enable Host Root Access

A new Rowhammer attack called GPUThor bypasses ECC on NVIDIA RTX A6000 GPUs with GDDR6 memory, enabling privilege escalation to host root access through bit-flip exploitation. The attack requires CUDA kernel execution and highlights vulnerabilities in DRAM refresh mechanisms despite ECC mitigation.

Academic researchers have disclosed a Rowhammer attack impacting NVIDIA workstation GPUs with GDDR6 memory that defeats error correction codes (ECC), the mitigation NVIDIA recommends against GPU Rowhammer, and enables denial-of-service (DoS) and privilege escalation to a root shell.

Dubbed GPUThor, the attack was developed by researchers at the University of Toronto, who hammered four DRAM

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