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Amplifying Latency and Cost of LLM Inference via Rowhammer Attack

Source
Arxiv (cs.CR + cs.CL + cs.LG)(opens in a new tab)
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Summary

Researchers present LLVMhammer, a Rowhammer attack that induces a bit-flip in Triton's compilation pipeline so that it generates a functionally identical but suboptimal GPU kernel. Because Triton caches the kernel on disk, one successful bit-flip causes persistent slowdown across later inference runs. Tested on Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct, Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.3 and Deepseek-llm-7B-chat on NVIDIA RTX 4090 and AMD RX 7900 XTX GPUs, the attack raised inference latency by 4-16% and could reduce BERTScore to as low as 25%.

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