ue, 07 Apr 2026
← BackResearchers from the University of Toronto discovered a new Rowhammer attack enabling privilege escalation via DRAM bit flips. This extends traditional Rowhammer vulnerabilities from CPUs to GPUs, posing emerging security risks.
A team of researchers from the University of Toronto has discovered a new Rowhammer attack that threat actors can use to escalate privileges. The Rowhammer technique, a hardware vulnerability known for more than a decade, works by repeatedly accessing — or “hammering” — a specific row of DRAM memory cells. This rapid activity can generate electrical interference that causes bit flips in neighboring memory regions. Over the years, researchers have shown that Rowhammer attacks can be exploited to enable privilege escalation, unauthorized data access, data corruption, and breaches of memory isolation in virtualized environments.
Until recently, however, such attacks had been limited to CPUs and traditional CPU-based memory. With GPUs playing an increasingly critical role in AI and machine learning workloads, a team from the University of Toronto last year successfully demonstrated a Rowhammer-style attack targeting the memory of an Nvidia GPU. They showed how the attack, dubbed GPUHammer, can induce bit flips that significantly degrade the accuracy of deep neural network (DNN) models, including ImageNet-trained models used for visual object recognition. The researchers behind GPUHammer, assisted by several others, have now demonstrated that GPU Rowhammer attacks can be used for more than just disruption.