Vulnerable GPU Memory Management: Towards Recovering Raw Data from GPU

Understand

In this paper, we present that security threats coming with existing GPU memory management strategy are overlooked, which opens a back door for adversaries to freely break the memory isolation: they enable adversaries without any privilege in a computer to recover the raw memory data left by previous processes directly.

• More importantly, such attacks can work on not only normal multi-user operating systems, but also cloud computing platforms.
• To demonstrate the seriousness of such attacks, we recovered original data directly from GPU memory residues left by exited commodity applications, including Google Chrome, Adobe Reader, GIMP, Matlab.
• The results show that, because of the vulnerable memory management strategy, commodity applications in our experiments are all affected.