Multicore DRAM Bank-& Row-Conflict Bomb for Timing Attacks in Mixed-Criticality Systems

Abstract

With the increasing use of multicore platforms to realize mixed-criticality systems, understanding the underlying shared resources, such as the memory hierarchy shared among cores, and achieving isolation between co-executing tasks running on the same platform with different criticality levels becomes relevant. In addition to safety considerations, a malicious entity can exploit shared resources to create timing attacks on critical applications. In this paper, we focus on understanding the shared DRAM dual in-line memory module and created a timing attack, that we named the "bank & row conflict bomb", to target a victim task in a multicore platform. We also created a "navigate" algorithm to understand how victim requests are managed by the Memory Controller and provide valuable inputs for designing the bank & row conflict bomb. We performed experimental tests on a 2nd Gen Intel Xeon Processor with an 8GB DDR4-2666 DRAM module to show that such an attack can produce a significant increase in the execution time of the victim task by about 150%, motivating the need for proper countermeasures to help ensure the safety and security of critical applications.