Paper Info
Title
RowHammer: A Retrospective.
Abstract
This retrospective paper describes the RowHammer problem in dynamic random access memory (DRAM), which was initially introduced by Kim <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">et al.</italic> at the ISCA 2014 Conference. RowHammer is a prime (and perhaps the first) example of how a circuit-level failure mechanism can cause a practical and widespread system security vulnerability. It is the phenomenon that repeatedly accessing a row in a modern DRAM chip causes bit flips in physically adjacent rows at consistently predictable bit locations. RowHammer is caused by a hardware failure mechanism called <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">DRAM disturbance errors</italic> , which is a manifestation of circuit-level cell-to-cell interference in a scaled memory technology. Researchers from Google Project Zero demonstrated in 2015 that this hardware failure mechanism can be effectively exploited by user-level programs to gain kernel privileges on real systems. Many other follow-up works demonstrated other practical attacks exploiting RowHammer. In this paper, we comprehensively survey the scientific literature on RowHammer-based attacks as well as mitigation techniques to prevent RowHammer. We also discuss what other related vulnerabilities may be lurking in DRAM and other types of memories, e.g., NAND flash memory or phase change memory, that can potentially threaten the foundations of secure systems, as the memory technologies scale to higher densities. We conclude by describing and advocating a principled approach to memory reliability and security research that can enable us to better anticipate and prevent such vulnerabilities.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.1109/TCAD.2019.2915318
IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Security,Failure analysis,Reliability,DRAM chips,Hardware,Memory management
Journal
39
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
8
0278-0070
17
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.57
0
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Onur Mutlu19446357.40
Jeremie Kim226313.68