New GPUThor Rowhammer Defeats ECC on NVIDIA RTX A6000 to Gain Host Root Access

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

Researchers disclosed a new GPUThor Rowhammer attack against NVIDIA RTX A6000 GPUs with GDDR6 memory that can bypass ECC protections and enable denial-of-service and escalation to host root access, according to the article summary. This demonstrates that hardware faults in accelerator GPUs can undermine assumed isolation and reliability guarantees for AI workloads and infrastructure. From a RealGround perspective, AI systems that rely on shared or multi-tenant GPU infrastructure may inherit this hardware-level risk in their supply chain, potentially allowing attackers to disrupt models or compromise host environments. Organizations should treat GPU hardware and firmware as critical AI supply chain components, requiring hardening, access control, and continuous review of hardware vulnerability disclosures.