Security researcher finds way to turn AMD GPU into radio transmitter with 50 feet range

Security researchers Mikhail Davidov and Baron Oldenburg cooked up an impressive way to steal data from an airgapped computer with an AMD GPU. The idea here is that you can turn the GPU into a tunable radio transmitter, via rapid manipulation of its clockspeeds. Impressively, the signal has a range of up to 50 foot (15.2m) and can pass through walls. The maximum bandwidth is unknown but exploitation is limited as it requires the installation of privileged software on your PC:

Even worse, the attack doesn't require any special hacks of the GPU driver or physical modification of the graphics card in any way - only a tool that can manipulate its clock speeds (any overclocking software can do that). Luckily, overclocking tools are privileged applications (requiring ring-0 access), and in most machines it springs up a UAC gate unless the overclocking software installs a driver and service that runs in the background (this installation requires a UAC authorization in the first place).

NVIDIA isn't mentioned but given the nature of this attack, it's probably not limited to AMD.

We turned a Radeon GPU's shader clock in to a tunable radio transmitter that can jump through walls & get picked up 50ft away.

Get your Van Eck fill and learn how to find these and other RF side-channels from myself and @baron of @duo_labs!

https://t.co/nTsEpSqahL pic.twitter.com/ElfA0Q8eqI

— Mikhail Davidov (@sirus) April 22, 2020

Via: TPU