Paper Info
Title
SoftTRR: Protect Page Tables against Rowhammer Attacks using Software-only Target Row Refresh
Abstract
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 privilege escalation attacks. In this paper, we propose an effective and practical software-only defense, called SoftTRR, to protect page tables from all existing rowhammer attacks on x86. The key idea of SoftTRR is to refresh the rows occupied by page tables when a suspicious rowhammer activity is detected. SoftTRR is motivated by DRAM-chip-based target row refresh (ChipTRR) but eliminates its main security limitation (i.e., ChipTRR tracks a limited number of rows and thus can be bypassed by many-sided hammer). Specifically, SoftTRR protects an unlimited number of page tables by tracking memory accesses to the rows that are in close proximity to page-table rows and refreshing the page-table rows once the tracked access count exceeds a pre-defined threshold. We implement a prototype of SoftTRR as a loadable kernel module, and evaluate its security effectiveness, performance overhead, and memory consumption. The experimental results show that SoftTRR protects page tables from real-world rowhammer attacks and incurs small performance overhead as well as memory cost.
Year
Venue
DocType
2022
USENIX Annual Technical Conference (USENIX ATC)
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
0
Authors
10
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Zhi Zhang1113.92
Yueqiang Cheng265.51
Minghua Wang36415.40
Wei He42910.01
Wenhao Wang559.95
Surya Nepal61486186.76
Yansong Gao7285.43
Kang Li833729.74
Zhe Wang919824.41
Chenggang Wu10446.57