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arXiv · 2003.04498

Are We Susceptible to Rowhammer? An End-to-End Methodology for Cloud Providers

Lucian Cojocar·Jeremie Kim·Minesh Patel·Lillian Tsai·Stefan Saroiu·Alec Wolman·Onur Mutlu
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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 end-to-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.

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Lucian Cojocar, Jeremie Kim, Minesh Patel, Lillian Tsai, Stefan Saroiu, Alec Wolman, Onur Mutlu. 2020-03-10. Are We Susceptible to Rowhammer? An End-to-End Methodology for Cloud Providers. https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.04498

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