Ragnar: Exploring Volatile-Channel Vulnerabilities on RDMA NIC
Yunpeng Xu, Yuchen Fan, Teng Ma, Shuwen Deng · 2025
With the surge in data computation, Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) becomes crucial to offering low-latency and highthroughput communication for data centers, but it faces new security threats. This paper presents RAGNAR, a comprehensive suite of hardware-contention-based volatile-channel attacks leveraging the underexplored security vulnerabilities in RDMA hardware. Through comprehensive microbenchmark reverse engineering, we analyze RDMA NICs at multiple granularity levels and then construct covert-channel attacks, achieving 3.2x the bandwidth of state-of-the-art RDMA-targeted attacks on CX-5. We apply side-channel attacks on real-world distributed databases and disaggregated memory, where we successfully fingerprint operations and recover sensitive address data with 95.6% accuracy.