CUDA, Woulda, Shoulda: Hacking Your GPU Using Return-Oriented Programming (ROP)

What is it about?

This paper proves that Return-Oriented Programming (ROP) is a viable attacker primitive on Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), just like on the CPU. Previous work dismissed its expressiveness, limiting its effectiveness to simple attacks that could be achieved with other techniques. Nevertheless, we demonstrate that Turing-complete ROP chains are once again possible. Therefore, we want this paper to function as a call to arms for GPU manufacturers and developers to design comprehensive memory safety mitigations for GPUs.

Featured Image

Photo by Nana Dua on Unsplash

Photo by Nana Dua on Unsplash

Why is it important?

We are the first to demonstrate that arbitrary computations are possible using ROP-based attacks on GPUs. This shows that GPUs, like CPUs decades ago, are vulnerable to many attacks and thus need comprehensive mitigations.