GPU Breach: A Root Shell Through GPU Abuse

The University of Toronto research team, led by Chris S. Lin and Prof. Gururaj Saileshwar recently disclosed GPUBreach (https://gpubreach.ca) a new class of attack targeting NVIDIA GPU drivers. The work highlights how fault injection techniques such as Rowhammer can be combined with GPU memory management behavior to achieve privilege escalation, even in environments with protections like the IOMMU enabled.

This article is about how we, at Stealthium, reverse engineered what was going on and explain this new kind of attack.