AMD patents a system that protects GPU memory against vulnerabilities

AMD filed a patent on a new system that protects GPU memory instructions from potential vulnerabilities.

The last two years have detected a large number of vulnerabilities at the hardware level. In-depth research has begun on the security of architectures, something that had not been done before. To improve security and avoid the appearance of more vulnerabilities and exploits, AMD has developed a special system for communication between the GPU and the memories.

One of the main security problems is in the communication between the memories and the processor. In this process, the information can be exposed and hunted by an external attacker. AMD has developed an instruction protection system for GPU memories to prevent security flaws.

AMD patents a method of protecting GPU memory vulnerabilities

Specter, Meltdown, SWAPGS, Screw Driversetc, are a lot of vulnerabilities. This is a problem, because each of these results in a performance cut due to mitigations. All these problems are forcing companies to put the batteries in the field of security.

The system developed by AMD is based on a “master and slave” system of devices and manipulates the instruction flows, checking for errors in the process. First, the system converts the request from the “slave” device into dummy operations like NOP (No OPeration). Modify the memory register to issue N master and N slave global / shared memory instructions per cycle. Master memory requests are sent to the memory system.

Slave requests for error checking and entering master requests are stored in FIFO (First In First Out) memory, which is also known as a memory buffer. The slave request is stored in a register. Finally the two register values, the one from the slave memory request and the FIFO, are compared to see if there are differences.

Source: TPU