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Related papers: RowPress Vulnerability in Modern DRAM Chips

200 papers

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

Today's systems have diverse needs that are difficult to address using one-size-fits-all commodity DRAM. Unfortunately, although system designers can theoretically adapt commodity DRAM chips to meet their particular design goals (e.g., by…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2022-04-25 Minesh Patel , Taha Shahroodi , Aditya Manglik , A. Giray Yaglikci , Ataberk Olgun , Haocong Luo , Onur Mutlu

In this paper, we investigate the advanced circuit features such as wordline- (WL) underdrive (prevents retention failure) and overdrive (assists write) employed in the peripherals of Dynamic RAM (DRAM) memories from a security perspective.…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2020-01-06 Karthikeyan Nagarajan , Asmit De , Mohammad Nasim Imtiaz Khan , Swaroop Ghosh

Non-volatile memory (NVM) is a class of promising scalable memory technologies that can potentially offer higher capacity than DRAM at the same cost point. Unfortunately, the access latency and energy of NVM is often higher than those of…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2018-05-01 HanBin Yoon , Justin Meza , Rachata Ausavarungnirun , Rachael A. Harding , Onur Mutlu

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

DRAM is the building block of modern main memory systems. DRAM cells must be periodically refreshed to prevent data loss. Refresh operations degrade system performance by interfering with memory accesses. As DRAM chip density increases with…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2022-09-22 Abdullah Giray Yağlıkçı , Ataberk Olgun , Minesh Patel , Haocong Luo , Hasan Hassan , Lois Orosa , Oğuz Ergin , Onur Mutlu

The rowhammer bug allows an attacker to gain privilege escalation or steal private data. A key requirement of all existing rowhammer attacks is that an attacker must have access to at least part of an exploitable hammer row. We refer to…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2020-07-31 Zhi Zhang , Yueqiang Cheng , Dongxi Liu , Surya Nepal , Zhi Wang

A fundamental assumption in software security is that memory contents do not change unless there is a legitimate deliberate modification. Classical fault attacks show that this assumption does not hold if the attacker has physical access.…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2018-05-15 Moritz Lipp , Misiker Tadesse Aga , Michael Schwarz , Daniel Gruss , Clémentine Maurice , Lukas Raab , Lukas Lamster

Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) is the prevalent memory technology used to build main memory systems of almost all computers. A fundamental shortcoming of DRAM is the need to refresh memory cells to keep stored data intact. DRAM refresh…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2023-06-29 Onur Mutlu

DRAM-based main memories have read operations that destroy the read data, and as a result, must buffer large amounts of data on each array access to keep chip costs low. Unfortunately, system-level trends such as increased memory contention…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2018-12-18 Justin Meza , Jing Li , Onur Mutlu

This paper investigates secure low-cost in-DRAM trackers for mitigating Rowhammer (RH). In-DRAM solutions have the advantage that they can solve the RH problem within the DRAM chip, without relying on other parts of the system. However,…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-07-24 Moinuddin Qureshi , Salman Qazi , Aamer Jaleel

With deep learning deployed in many security-sensitive areas, machine learning security is becoming progressively important. Recent studies demonstrate attackers can exploit system-level techniques exploiting the RowHammer vulnerability of…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-09-11 Ranyang Zhou , Sabbir Ahmed , Adnan Siraj Rakin , Shaahin Angizi

Rowhammer is a hardware security vulnerability at the heart of every system with modern DRAM-based memory. Despite its discovery a decade ago, comprehensive defenses remain elusive, while the probability of successful attacks grows with…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-09-25 Anish Saxena , Walter Wang , Alexandros Daglis

Per Row Activation Counting (PRAC) has emerged as a robust framework for mitigating RowHammer (RH) vulnerabilities in modern DRAM systems. However, we uncover a critical vulnerability: a timing channel introduced by the Alert Back-Off (ABO)…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Jeonghyun Woo , Joyce Qu , Gururaj Saileshwar , Prashant J. Nair

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

The security vulnerabilities due to Rowhammer have worsened over the last decade, with existing in-DRAM solutions, such as TRR, getting broken with simple patterns. In response, the DDR5 specifications have been extended to support Per-Row…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-07-16 Moinuddin Qureshi , Salman Qazi

The purpose of this document is to study the security properties of the Silver Bullet algorithm against worst-case RowHammer attacks. We mathematically demonstrate that Silver Bullet, when properly configured and implemented in a DRAM chip,…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2021-06-17 Abdullah Giray Yağlıkçı , Jeremie S. Kim , Fabrice Devaux , Onur Mutlu

The Rowhammer vulnerability continues to get worse, with the Rowhammer Threshold (TRH) reducing from 139K activations to 4.8K activations over the last decade. Typical Rowhammer mitigations rely on tracking aggressor rows. The number of…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-11-08 Anish Saxena , Moinuddin Qureshi

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 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