New Side-Channel Attacks Target Graphics Processing Units

A new brand of side-channel vulnerabilities has been disclosed and this time it’s not the CPU that’s under attack: it’s the GPU.

New exploits published by computer scientists at the University of California, Riverside, leave both individual users and high-performance computing systems at potential risk. The three sets of exploits pull sensitive data out of a graphics processing unit core, and do so with relative ease, compared to some of the side-channel attacks that have been demonstrated on CPUs.

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Two of the attacks target individual users, pulling information on website history and passwords. The third could open the door to an organization’s machine-learning or neural network applications, exposing details about their computational model to competitors.

The researchers’ paper, Rendered Insecure: GPU Side Channel Attacks are Practical, was presented at the ACM SIGSAC conference, and the vulnerabilities have been disclosed to Nvidia, Intel, and AMD.

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Read more: Dark Reading

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