Researchers Uncover New GPU Side-Channel Vulnerability Leaking Sensitive Data
Sep 27, 2023
Vulnerability / Endpoint Security
A novel side-channel attack called GPU.zip renders virtually all modern graphics processing units (GPU) vulnerable to information leakage. "This channel exploits an optimization that is data dependent, software transparent, and present in nearly all modern GPUs: graphical data compression," a group of academics from the University of Texas at Austin, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Washington, and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign said . Graphical data compression is a feature in integrated GPUs (iGPUs) that allows for saving memory bandwidth and improving performance when rendering frames, compressing visual data losslessly even when it's not requested by software. The study found that the compression, which happens in various vendor-specific and undocumented ways, induces data-dependent DRAM traffic and cache occupancy that can be measured using a side-channel. "An attacker can exploit the iGPU-based compression channel to perform cro