A Novel GPU Overdrive Fault Attack

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 the first-ever overdrive fault attack targeting modern GPUs. 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 an AMD GPU, recovering the AES keys in minutes. Such software-controlled fault injections also pose serious threats to data integrity and service availability in the cloud.