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DRAM chips are vulnerable to read disturbance phenomena (e.g., RowHammer and RowPress), where repeatedly accessing or keeping open a DRAM row causes bitflips in nearby rows. Attackers leverage RowHammer bitflips in real systems to take over…

DRAM is the primary technology used for main memory in modern systems. Unfortunately, as DRAM scales down to smaller technology nodes, it faces key challenges in both data integrity and latency, which strongly affect overall system…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2023-03-15 Hasan Hassan

Inter-VM RowHammer is an attack that induces a bitflip beyond the boundaries of virtual machines (VMs) to compromise a VM from another, and some software-based techniques have been proposed to mitigate this attack. Evaluating these…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Hidemasa Kawasaki , Soramichi Akiyama

This dissertation rigorously characterizes many modern commodity DRAM devices and shows that by exploiting DRAM access timing margins within manufacturer-recommended DRAM timing specifications, we can significantly improve system…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2021-09-30 Jeremie S. Kim

Rowhammer has drawn much attention from both academia and industry in the past years as rowhammer exploitation poses severe consequences to system security. Since the first comprehensive study of rowhammer in 2014, a number of rowhammer…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-05-02 Zhi Zhang , Decheng Chen , Jiahao Qi , Yueqiang Cheng , Shijie Jiang , Yiyang Lin , Yansong Gao , Surya Nepal , Yi Zou , Jiliang Zhang , Yang Xiang

Modern systems mitigate Rowhammer using victim refresh, which refreshes the two neighbours of an aggressor row when it encounters a specified number of activations. Unfortunately, complex attack patterns like Half-Double break…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-08-30 Anish Saxena , Saurav Mathur , Moinuddin Qureshi

RowHammer vulnerabilities pose a significant threat to modern DRAM-based systems, where rapid activation of DRAM rows can induce bit-flips in neighboring rows. To mitigate this, state-of-the-art host-side RowHammer mitigations typically…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-05-16 Jeonghyun Woo , Prashant J. Nair

RowHammer is a circuit-level DRAM vulnerability where repeatedly accessing (i.e., hammering) a DRAM row can cause bit flips in physically nearby rows. The RowHammer vulnerability worsens as DRAM cell size and cell-to-cell spacing shrink.…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2021-10-22 Lois Orosa , Abdullah Giray Yağlıkçı , Haocong Luo , Ataberk Olgun , Jisung Park , Hasan Hassan , Minesh Patel , Jeremie S. Kim , Onur Mutlu

As Dynamic Random Access Memories (DRAM) scale, they are becoming increasingly susceptible to Row Hammer. By rapidly activating rows of DRAM cells (aggressor rows), attackers can exploit inter-cell interference through Row Hammer to flip…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-03-19 Jeonghyun Woo , Gururaj Saileshwar , Prashant J. Nair

Rowhammer attacks that corrupt level-1 page tables to gain kernel privilege are the most detrimental to system security and hard to mitigate. However, recently proposed software-only mitigations are not effective against such kernel…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2021-12-14 Zhi Zhang , Yueqiang Cheng , Minghua Wang , Wei He , Wenhao Wang , Nepal Surya , Yansong Gao , Kang Li , Zhe Wang , Chenggang Wu

Rowhammer is a critical vulnerability in dynamic random access memory (DRAM) that continues to pose a significant threat to various systems. However, we find that conventional load-based attacks are becoming highly ineffective on the most…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Weijie Chen , Shan Tang , Yulin Tang , Xiapu Luo , Yinqian Zhang , Weizhong Qiang

This retrospective paper describes the RowHammer problem in Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM), which was initially introduced by Kim et al. at the ISCA 2014 conference~\cite{rowhammer-isca2014}. RowHammer is a prime (and perhaps the…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2019-04-23 Onur Mutlu , Jeremie S. Kim

RowHammer is a circuit-level DRAM vulnerability, where repeatedly activating and precharging a DRAM row, and thus alternating the voltage of a row's wordline between low and high voltage levels, can cause bit flips in physically nearby…

Generational improvements to commodity DRAM throughout half a century have long solidified its prevalence as main memory across the computing industry. However, overcoming today's DRAM technology scaling challenges requires new solutions…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2024-01-30 Minesh Patel , Taha Shahroodi , Aditya Manglik , Abdullah Giray Yağlıkçı , Ataberk Olgun , Haocong Luo , Onur Mutlu

This paper challenges the existing victim-focused counter-based RowHammer detection mechanisms by experimentally demonstrating a novel multi-sided fault injection attack technique called Threshold Breaker. This mechanism can effectively…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2023-11-29 Ranyang Zhou , Jacqueline Liu , Sabbir Ahmed , Nakul Kochar , Adnan Siraj Rakin , Shaahin Angizi

This paper focuses on mitigating DRAM Rowhammer attacks. In recent years, solutions like TRR have been deployed in DDR4 DRAM to track aggressor rows and then issue a mitigative action by refreshing neighboring victim rows. Unfortunately,…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-04-26 Aamer Jaleel , Stephen W. Keckler , Gururaj Saileshwar

Our ISCA 2014 paper provided the first scientific and detailed characterization, analysis, and real-system demonstration of what is now popularly known as the RowHammer phenomenon (or vulnerability) in modern commodity DRAM chips, which are…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-06-29 Onur Mutlu

RowHammer stands out as a prominent example, potentially the pioneering one, showcasing how a failure mechanism at the circuit level can give rise to a significant and pervasive security vulnerability within systems. Prior research has…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-04-30 Ranyang Zhou , Jacqueline T. Liu , Nakul Kochar , Sabbir Ahmed , Adnan Siraj Rakin , Shaahin Angizi

Rowhammer is a hardware vulnerability in DRAM memory, where repeated access to memory can induce bit flips in neighboring memory locations. Being a hardware vulnerability, rowhammer bypasses all of the system memory protection, allowing…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2020-07-30 Zhi Zhang , Yueqiang Cheng , Dongxi Liu , Surya Nepal , Zhi Wang , Yuval Yarom

DRAM scaling has exacerbated the RowHammer vulnerability. To counter this, JEDEC recently introduced Per Row Activation Counting (PRAC) with the Alert Back-Off protocol as an optional DDR5 feature. While promising, PRAC requires per-row…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Jeonghyun Woo , Junsu Kim , Aamer Jaleel , Prashant J. Nair