CSI:Rowhammer: Closing the Case of Half-Double and Beyond

Rowhammer is a severe security problem in DRAM, allowing an unprivileged adversary to gain kernel privileges by inducing electrical disturbance errors. Today, mitigations against Rowhammer, most notably Targeted Row Refresh (TRR), are widely adopted and even part of recent DRAM standards.In this talk, we first show that TRR is insufficient by design and counterintuitively assists an attacker in the context of our new Rowhammer type: Half-Double. Unlike all previous Rowhammer attacks, Half-Double hammers from a distance of two...

By: Jonas …

adversary attacks beyond case context csi design dram errors kernel kernel privileges mitigations presentation privileges problem rowhammer security standards