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Main Authors: Li, Mingkai, Devietti, Joseph, Jana, Suman, Khan, Tanvir Ahmed
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.05725
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author Li, Mingkai
Devietti, Joseph
Jana, Suman
Khan, Tanvir Ahmed
author_facet Li, Mingkai
Devietti, Joseph
Jana, Suman
Khan, Tanvir Ahmed
contents Modern computing is shifting from homogeneous CPU-centric systems to heterogeneous systems with closely integrated CPUs and GPUs. While the CPU software stack has benefited from decades of memory safety hardening, the GPU software stack remains dangerously immature. This discrepancy presents a critical ethical challenge: the world's most advanced AI and scientific workloads are increasingly deployed on vulnerable hardware components. In this paper, we study the key challenges of ensuring memory safety on heterogeneous systems. We show that, while the number of exploitable bugs in heterogeneous systems rises every year, current mitigation methods often rely on unfaithful translations, i.e., converting GPU programs to run on CPUs for testing, which fails to capture the architectural differences between CPUs and GPUs. We argue that the faithfulness of the program behavior is at the core of secure and reliable heterogeneous systems design. To ensure faithfulness, we discuss several design considerations of a GPU-native fuzzing pipeline for CUDA programs.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_05725
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Challenges and Design Considerations for Finding CUDA Bugs Through GPU-Native Fuzzing
Li, Mingkai
Devietti, Joseph
Jana, Suman
Khan, Tanvir Ahmed
Cryptography and Security
Modern computing is shifting from homogeneous CPU-centric systems to heterogeneous systems with closely integrated CPUs and GPUs. While the CPU software stack has benefited from decades of memory safety hardening, the GPU software stack remains dangerously immature. This discrepancy presents a critical ethical challenge: the world's most advanced AI and scientific workloads are increasingly deployed on vulnerable hardware components. In this paper, we study the key challenges of ensuring memory safety on heterogeneous systems. We show that, while the number of exploitable bugs in heterogeneous systems rises every year, current mitigation methods often rely on unfaithful translations, i.e., converting GPU programs to run on CPUs for testing, which fails to capture the architectural differences between CPUs and GPUs. We argue that the faithfulness of the program behavior is at the core of secure and reliable heterogeneous systems design. To ensure faithfulness, we discuss several design considerations of a GPU-native fuzzing pipeline for CUDA programs.
title Challenges and Design Considerations for Finding CUDA Bugs Through GPU-Native Fuzzing
topic Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.05725