NVIDIA Urges Users to Enable ECC to Defend GDDR6 GPUs Against Rowhammer Threats

NVIDIA has issued a renewed advisory encouraging customers to activate System Level Error-Correcting Code (ECC) protections to defend against Rowhammer attacks targeting GPUs equipped with GDDR6 memory.

This heightened warning follows recent research from the University of Toronto demonstrating how practical Rowhammer attacks can be on NVIDIA’s A6000 graphics processor.

“We ran GPUHammer on an NVIDIA RTX A6000 (48 GB GDDR6) across four DRAM banks and observed 8 distinct single-bit flips, and bit-flips across all tested banks,” the researchers explained. “The minimum activation count (TRH) to induce a flip was ~12K, consistent with prior DDR4 findings.”

Using these induced bit flips, the researchers performed what they described as the first machine learning accuracy degradation attack leveraging Rowhammer on a GPU.

Rowhammer exploits a hardware vulnerability where repeatedly accessing a memory row can cause adjacent memory cells to change state, flipping bits from 1 to 0 or vice versa. This can lead to denial-of-service issues, corrupted data, or even potential privilege escalation.

System Level ECC combats such risks by intro

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