A group of researchers has discovered a new attack called GPUHammer that can flip bits in the memory of NVIDIA GPUs, quietly corrupting AI models and causing serious damage, without ever touching the actual code or data input. Fortunately, Nvidia is already ahead of the bad actors and has put out guidelines on how to mitigate the risk involved in this situation. Regardless, if you’re using a card with GDDR6 memory, this is worth paying attention to
The team behind the discovery, from the University of Toronto, showed how the attack could drop an AI model’s accuracy from 80% to under 1%—just by flipping a single bit in memory. It’s not just theoretical either, as they ran it on a real NVIDIA RTX A6000, using a technique that repeatedly hammers memory cells until one nearby flips, messing with whatever’s stored there.
