Title
HammerScope: Observing DRAM Power Consumption Using Rowhammer
Abstract
ABSTRACTThe constant reduction in memory cell sizes has increased memory density and reduced power consumption, but has also affected its reliability. The Rowhammer attack exploits this reduced reliability to induce bit flips in memory, without directly accessing these bits. Most Rowhammer attacks target software integrity, but some recent attacks demonstrated its use for compromising confidentiality. Continuing this trend, in this paper we observe that the \rh attack strongly correlates with the memory instantaneous power consumption. We exploit this observation to design HammerScope, a Rowhammer-based attack technique for measuring the power consumption of the memory unit. Because the power consumption correlates with the level of activity of the memory, \hs allows an attacker to infer memory activity. To demonstrate the offensive capabilities of HammerScope, we use it to mount three information leakage attacks. We first show that \hs can be used to break kernel address-space layout randomization (KASLR). Our second attack uses memory activity as a covert channel for a Spectre attack, allowing us to leak information from the operating system kernel. Finally, we demonstrate the use of HammerScope for performing website fingerprinting, compromising user privacy. Our work demonstrates the importance of finding systematic solutions for Rowhammer attacks.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.1145/3548606.3560688
Computer and Communications Security
DocType
Citations 
PageRank 
Conference
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
7
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Yaakov Cohen100.34
Kevin Sam Tharayil200.34
Arie Haenel301.35
Daniel Genkin457931.18
Angelos D. Keromytis54678385.02
Yossi Oren6458.92
Yuval Yarom777535.54