Paper Info
Title
Are We Susceptible to Rowhammer? An End-to-End Methodology for Cloud Providers
Abstract
Cloud providers are concerned that Rowhammer poses a potentially critical threat to their servers, yet today they lack a systematic way to test whether the DRAM used in their servers is vulnerable to Rowhammer attacks. This paper presents an endto-end methodology to determine if cloud servers are susceptible to these attacks. With our methodology, a cloud provider can construct worst-case testing conditions for DRAM.We apply our methodology to three classes of servers from a major cloud provider. Our findings show that none of the CPU instruction sequences used in prior work to mount Rowhammer attacks create worst-case DRAM testing conditions. To address this limitation, we develop an instruction sequence that leverages microarchitectural side-effects to "hammer" DRAM at a near-optimal rate on modern Intel Skylake and Cascade Lake platforms. We also design a DDR4 fault injector that can reverse engineer row adjacency for any DDR4 DIMM. When applied to our cloud provider's DIMMs, we find that DRAM rows do not always follow a linear map.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.1109/SP40000.2020.00085
2020 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP)
Keywords
DocType
ISSN
cloud provider,Rowhammer attacks,cloud servers,worst-case testing conditions,worst-case DRAM testing conditions,end-to-end methodology,Intel Skylake,Cascade Lake platform,CPU instruction sequences
Conference
1081-6011
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-7281-3498-7
10
0.45
References 
Authors
21
7
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Cojocar Lucian1100.45
Jeremie Kim226313.68
Minesh Patel32049.82
Lillian Tsai4100.79
Stefan Saroiu53959282.34
Alec Wolman63496267.66
Onur Mutlu79446357.40