Security News > 2022 > March > Nvidia DGX systems prone to side channel, covert attacks

Nvidia's ultra-dense GPU-driven AI training and inference systems are prone to covert and side channel attacks, according to research just published from a team led by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

Let's start with the good news: the problems are most pressing for pre-Ampere GPU generation DGX machines and luckily, the major cloud operators have made the DGX switch to Nvidia Ampere-generation DGX machines.

They add that "This observation enables us to create contention on remote caches by allocating memory on the target GPU, which is the essential ingredient enabling our covert and side channels. Specifically, we develop the first microarchitectural covert and side-channel attacks across GPUs in a multi-GPU servers."

The attacks we develop are first Prime+Probe based timing attacks on L2 cache on GPUs.

Our attacks extract contention information at the granularity of a single cache set, providing highresolution attacks with fine-grained access time measurements, reducing the noise, and achieving high quality channels.

As a result, we believe this attack model challenges assumptions from prior GPU based attacks and significantly expands our understanding of the threat model in Multi-GPU servers.

News URL

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2022/03/31/dgx-security-attack-vulnerability/