7.3CRMay 5
GPUBreach: Privilege Escalation Attacks on GPUs using RowhammerChris S. Lin, Yuqin Yan, Guozhen Ding et al.
NVIDIA GPUs with GDDR memories have been shown susceptible to Rowhammer-based bit-flips, similar to CPUs. However, Rowhammer exploits on GPUs have been limited to injecting untargeted bit-flips in victim data like weights of machine learning models, to degrade model accuracy, unlike CPU exploits shown capable of privilege escalation. In this paper, we demonstrate that GPU Rowhammer exploits can be as potent as CPU Rowhammer attacks. By exploiting the GPU page table management to identify when and where new page tables are allocated, we enable an unprivileged user CUDA kernel of one process to use RowHammer bit-flips to gain access to the GPU memory of other processes or co-tenants via targeted tampering of such page-tables resident on the GPU memory. Using this newly found primitive, we demonstrate the first GPU-side privilege escalation attacks, leaking secret data such as cryptographic keys from cuPQC libraries, and even tampering with the model's GPU assembly code to degrade models more stealthily than previous attacks. We further demonstrate that GPU-side privilege escalation can lead to CPU-side privilege escalation, defeating the protections provided by the IOMMU, enabling a malicious user-level program with GPU access to gain root shell and system-wide control, even in a non-multi-tenant setting.
CRNov 26, 2025
HMARK: Radioactive Multi-Bit Semantic-Latent Watermarking for Diffusion ModelsKexin Li, Guozhen Ding, Ilya Grishchenko et al.
Modern generative diffusion models rely on vast training datasets, often including images with uncertain ownership or usage rights. Radioactive watermarks -- marks that transfer to a model's outputs -- can help detect when such unauthorized data has been used for training. Moreover, aside from being radioactive, an effective watermark for protecting images from unauthorized training also needs to meet other existing requirements, such as imperceptibility, robustness, and multi-bit capacity. To overcome these challenges, we propose HMARK, a novel multi-bit watermarking scheme, which encodes ownership information as secret bits in the semantic-latent space (h-space) for image diffusion models. By leveraging the interpretability and semantic significance of h-space, ensuring that watermark signals correspond to meaningful semantic attributes, the watermarks embedded by HMARK exhibit radioactivity, robustness to distortions, and minimal impact on perceptual quality. Experimental results demonstrate that HMARK achieves 98.57% watermark detection accuracy, 95.07% bit-level recovery accuracy, 100% recall rate, and 1.0 AUC on images produced by the downstream adversarial model finetuned with LoRA on watermarked data across various types of distortions.