A previously unknown compression side channel in GPUs can expose images thought to be private.

GPUs from all major suppliers are vulnerable to new pixel-stealing attack::A previously unknown compression side channel in GPUs can expose images thought to be private.

  • AutoTL;DRBEnglish
    3•1 year ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    The researchers found that data compression that both internal and discrete GPUs use to improve performance acts as a side channel that they can abuse to bypass the restriction and steal pixels one by one.

    “We found that modern GPUs automatically try to compress this visual data, without any application involvement,” Yingchen Wang, the lead author and a researcher at the University of Texas at Austin, wrote in an email.

    Most websites restrict the cross-origin embedding of pages displaying user names, passwords, or other sensitive content through X-Frame-Options or Content-Security-Policy headers.

    All of the GPUs analyzed use proprietary forms of compression to optimize the bandwidth available in the memory data bus of the PC, phone, or other device displaying the targeted content.

    The insights yielded a method that uses the SVG, or the scalable vector graphics image format, to maximize differences in DRAM traffic between black and white target pixels in the presence of compression.

    Our proof-of-concept attack succeeds on a range of devices (including computers, phones) from a variety of hardware vendors with distinct GPU architectures (Intel, AMD, Apple, Nvidia).

    The original article contains 832 words, the summary contains 181 words. Saved 78%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

    • @[email protected]English
      33•1 year ago

      And it left out possibly the most important piece of information:

      For GPU.zip to work, a malicious page must be loaded into the Chrome or Edge browsers. Under-the-hood differences in the way Firefox and Safari work prevent the attack from succeeding when those browsers process an attack page.

      • @[email protected]English
        8•1 year ago

        Once again, this is another example of how poor these TLDR bots are. I asked a popular LLM (which people here love to hate) to summarize the article, and not only did I get an actual TLDR (< 150 words), it also included the most important piece of information:

        GPUs from major suppliers including Apple, Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, Arm, and Nvidia are vulnerable to an attack allowing malicious websites to read sensitive visual data from other websites. The exploit, named GPU.zip, violates the “same origin policy”, a fundamental internet security boundary. The vulnerability starts when a malicious site places a link in an iframe, an HTML element. While normally this policy prevents content interaction between sites, the data compression used by GPUs for performance optimization creates a side channel that can be exploited. To succeed, the attack requires loading a malicious page in Chrome or Edge; Firefox and Safari’s operational differences protect them. Furthermore, the targeted page in the iframe should allow cross-origin embedding. Although many sites block this embedding using X-Frame-Options or Content-Security-Policy headers, some, like Wikipedia, don’t. The current risk posed by GPU.zip is considered low, but the discovery emphasizes potential hardware-based side channels in security.

        • @bassomitronEnglish
          9•1 year ago

          It’s because many TLDR bots are using relatively basic algorithms to summarize versus incredibly complex language models that have been trained on billions of data points. No rational person would disagree with you that ChatGPT/LLaMA/etc are vastly more sophisticated and often more effective than a common bot.

        • TerrasqueEnglish
          1•1 year ago

          I’ve been toying with the idea of making a bot similar to autotldr, but using an llm to summarize the data for some time now.