Supporting Rowhammer research to protect the DRAM ecosystem
Brief
Posted by Daniel Moghimi Rowhammer is a complex class of vulnerabilities across the industry. It is a hardware vulnerability in DRAM where repeatedly accessing a row of memory can cause bit flips in adjacent rows, leading to data corruption. This can be exploited by attackers to gain unauthorized access to data, escalate privileges, or cause denial of service.
Hardware vendors have deployed various mitigations, such as ECC and Target Row Refresh (TRR) for DDR5 memory, to mitigate Rowhammer and enhance DRAM reliability. However, the resilience of those mitigations against sophisticated attackers remains an open question.
To address this gap and help the ecosystem with deploying robust defenses, Google has supported academic research and developed test platforms to analyze DDR5 memory.