Overdrive Fault Attacks on GPUs

Graphics processing units (GPUs) are widely used to accelerate applications including cryptographic operations. The reliability and security of GPUs have become a concern. Prior work reported power and timing side-channel attacks on GPUs. In this paper, we present our project about a new class of fault attacks targeting modern GPUs, the overdrive fault attacks. This attack exploits voltage-frequency scaling features present on most commercial GPUs to introduce random faults during kernel execution. We demonstrate an effective fault- based attack on a commercial GPU, recovering the AES keys in minutes and inducing misclassifications in a CNN kernel. Such software-controlled fault injections also pose serious threats to data integrity and service availability in the cloud.