Related papers: RowPress Vulnerability in Modern DRAM Chips
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…
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…
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.…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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)…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…