GHost in the SHELL

This project is the open-source component of our paper "GHost in the SHELL: A GPU-to-Host Memory Attack and Its Mitigation", submitted in IEEE Security and Privacy (S&P) 2026. This repository contains our attack poc, mitigation implementations, and evaluation platforms.

Environment

It is recommended to be worked in following environemnts.

Hardware: Intel CPU + NVIDIA GPU Ampere+
Software: Ubuntu 22.04

• This attack can be applied to CUDA version 12.2+ and NVIDIA GPU driver r535+, but, all our patches and build system are focused on CUDA 12.8 with driver r570.

• We confirmed that the attack succeed on NVIDIA GPU RTX 4060 and A 30.

Native installation

To try GHost-Attack and its mitigation, you need to setup its dependencies and requirements by following command (it needs sudo privileges).

cd ghost-in-the-shell
./init.sh

It takes about 3 to 4 hours to install whole needed dependencies and requirements. The script depends on pwd command, so the ./init.sh must be executed strictly from the ghost-in-the-shell directory

Directory Overview

Our project is structured as follows.

ghost-in-the-shell/
    ├── artifacts/
    │    ├── 3.GHost_Attack
    │    ├── 4.SHELL_Mitigation
    │    └── 6.Evaluation
    ├── third_party/
    ├── init.sh
    ├── apply-no-mitigation.sh
    └── apply-mitigation.sh

artifacts/: All testable POCs and evaluation codes are located in here.

• 3.GHost_Attack: Includes attack POCs introduced in paper section 3.
• 4.SHELL_Mitigation: Includes patch files for the mitigation (SHELL).
• 6.Evaluation: Includes end-to-end performance test on HMM_sample_code, and micro evaluation results.

third_party/: third party platforms required for testing are located in here. (e.g., llvm, cuda, pytorch ...)

Paper

(TO BE APPEAR in SP 2026)