New Attack Highlights Risks of Browsers Allowing Websites Access to GPU

A team of researchers from Graz University of Technology in Austria and the University of Rennes in France demonstrated a new graphics processing unit (GPU) attack that targets several popular browsers and graphics cards.

The study focused on WebGPU, an API that allows web developers to use the system’s GPU to perform high-performance computations in a web browser. They used this API to demonstrate an attack that runs entirely in the web browser and uses JavaScript. This makes it easier to execute remotely, but it also limits the potential impact when compared to previous attacks that required access to native GPU APIs.

The academic researchers described their work as one of the first GPU cache side-channel attacks carried out within a browser.

Read More: New Attack Shows Risks of Browsers Giving Websites Access to GPU