LeftoverLocals: Listening to LLM Responses Through Leaked GPU Local Memory

Tyler Sorensen; Heidy Khlaaf

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arXiv · 2401.16603

LeftoverLocals: Listening to LLM Responses Through Leaked GPU Local Memory

Tyler Sorensen·Heidy Khlaaf

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Abstract

This paper describes LeftoverLocals: a vulnerability that allows data recovery from GPU memory created by another process on Apple, Qualcomm, and AMD GPUs. LeftoverLocals impacts the security posture of GPU applications, with particular significance to LLMs and ML models that run on impacted GPUs. By recovering local memory, an optimized GPU memory region, we built a PoC where an attacker can listen into another user's interactive LLM session (e.g., llama.cpp) across process or container boundaries.

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BibTeX RIS

Tyler Sorensen, Heidy Khlaaf. 2024-01-29. LeftoverLocals: Listening to LLM Responses Through Leaked GPU Local Memory. https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.16603

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