Gerrymandering the Warp: Non-Control-Data Attacks on CUDA Collective Decision

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 10 Jun 2026] Gerrymandering the Warp: Non-Control-Data Attacks on CUDA Collective Decision Igor Santos-Grueiro CUDA collective operations often sit on security decision paths: votes accept batches, reductions aggregate evidence, shuffles select representatives, and barriers order checked state before use. Such decisions depend not only on computed values, but also on which lanes are represented, what evidence they contribute, which lane speaks for the group, and which checked state reaches commit. We identify this participation metadata as decision-making non-control data. We define Collective Semantic Corruption (CSC), a non-control-data attack family in which range-valid masks, predicates, source lanes, descriptors, group labels, or epochs cause a CUDA-conforming collective to authorize a decision over the wrong membership, contribution, role, or validation-to-use state. The kernel reaches the intended collective site and executes the expected primitive; the primitive represents the wrong authority set. We model CSC with a site-local participation-authority contract. A protected collective derives, recomputes, checks, or freezes membership, contribution, role, and temporal state before authorization. We evaluate CSC across NVIDIA CUDA collective primitives, trigger channels, compact workload-style kernels, reduced idiom bridges, and admission-guard harnesses. In a CUDA-defined contract-conformance suite spanning the four authority dimensions, corrupted participation metadata causes a trusted-reference mismatch in 102/102 instances, while hardened variants preserve that reference in 102/102. We report 13 synchronization-sensitive instances separately. We then introduce Collective Integrity Contracts (CIC), a wrapper discipline that binds participation metadata before collective use. For CUDA collective decisions, security depends on both the values computed and the participants represented. Comments: 17 pages Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) Cite as: arXiv:2606.11878 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2606.11878v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.11878 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Igor Santos-Grueiro [view email] [v1] Wed, 10 Jun 2026 10:00:35 UTC (39 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-06 Change to browse by: cs References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)