attack arXiv Mar 3, 2026 · 4w ago
Peter Horvath, Ilia Shumailov, Lukasz Chmielewski et al. · Radboud University · AI Security Company +2 more
Steals DNN and LLM weights from GPU Tensor Cores using electromagnetic side-channel attacks up to 100cm away
Model Theft visionnlp
The multi-million dollar investment required for modern machine learning (ML) has made large ML models a prime target for theft. In response, the field of model stealing has emerged. Attacks based on physical side-channel information have shown that DNN model extraction is feasible, even on CUDA Cores in a GPU. For the first time, our work demonstrates parameter extraction on the specialized GPU's Tensor Core units, most commonly used GPU units nowadays due to their superior performance, via near-field physical side-channel attacks. Previous work targeted only the general-purpose CUDA Cores in the GPU, the functional units that have been part of the GPU since its inception. Our method is tailored to the GPU architecture to accurately estimate energy consumption and derive efficient attacks via Correlation Power Analysis (CPA). Furthermore, we provide an exploratory analysis of hyperparameter and weight leakage from LLMs in far field and demonstrate that the GPU's electromagnetic radiation leaks even 100 cm away through a glass obstacle.
cnn llm transformer Radboud University · AI Security Company · Masaryk University +1 more