# Nvidia Workstation GPUs Fall Victim to First-Ever GDDR6 Rowhammer Bit-Flip Attack
In a significant security breach, researchers at the University of Toronto have demonstrated a new method for executing Rowhammer attacks on Nvidia A6000 workstation graphics cards with GDDR6 RAM. This vulnerability, dubbed GPUHammer, has serious implications for professional users who rely on these GPUs for their work.
## What to Do: Take Immediate Action to Protect Your Workstation
If you're a professional user concerned about security, it's essential to take immediate action to protect your workstation. Nvidia advises that enabling error-correcting code (ECC) is the best course of action. ECC guards against this newly demonstrated type of Rowhammer attack affecting GDDR6 RAM. While the vulnerability isn't being actively exploited, a mitigation is already available from Nvidia.
## Understanding Rowhammer Attacks
Rowhammer attacks involve rapidly accessing memory cells to exploit hardware-level vulnerabilities and cause bit-flips in neighboring cells. Bit-flipping can potentially cause substantial memory corruption. This type of attack has been known to affect DDR3 RAM since 2015, with DDR4 also being vulnerable in the following year.
## The New Research: GPUHammer
The new research represents the first successful attack on a GPU's GDDR RAM. Researchers were able to demonstrate that this vulnerability could severely degrade machine learning models, decreasing accuracy by up to 80 percent. Although the study only examined an Ampere chip with GDDR6 memory, newer models with GDDR7 or HBM2 RAM could also be vulnerable.
## Mitigating the Risk: Enabling ECC
Enabling ECC is a simple and effective way to mitigate this risk. Nvidia advises that users enable ECC on Blackwell, Ada, Hopper, Ampere, Jetson, Turing, and Volta workstation and data center GPUs. Users can confirm the status of SYS-ECC by checking out-of-band (OOB) or inspecting in-band (InB) via the CPU to the GPU.
## How to Enable ECC on Earlier Models
For users with earlier models that don't support on-die ECC, enabling ECC manually is possible through various means. Users can access the NSM Type 3 OOB document to set the ECC mode or use the NVIDIA-smi page to configure the ECC setting for the InB path.
## Impact on Performance
One of the researchers noted that enabling ECC can degrade RTX GPU performance by around 10%. However, this is a small price to pay compared to the potential risk posed by Rowhammer attacks.
### Conclusion
The recent discovery of the GDDR6 Rowhammer vulnerability highlights the importance of security in the digital age. Nvidia's proactive response to this issue has ensured that users can take immediate action to protect their workstations. By enabling ECC, professionals can safeguard against this type of attack and maintain the integrity of their systems.
### Resources
* Nvidia Security Advisory:
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