Hardwear.io NL 2023 | CSI:Rowhammer - Cryptographic Security And Integrity Against Rowhammer - Jonas

The discovery of Rowhammer was almost a decade ago, and the problem is still unsolved. Actually, it is getting worse, with newer DDR generations being ever more vulnerable. Deployed defenses are repeatedly broken with new hammer methods or exploiting previously unknown effects in the DRAM. In this talk, I present CSI:Rowhammer, a principled hardware-software co-design Rowhammer mitigation with cryptographic security and integrity guarantees that does not focus on any specific properties of Rowhammer. Due to this generic design, CSI:Rowhammer protects against all Rowhammer attacks, even new ones that were unknown at the time of publication of the paper.
CSI:Rowhammer uses a new memory error detection mechanism based on a low-latency cryptographic MAC and an exception mechanism initiating a software-level correction routine. The exception handler uses a novel instruction-set extension for the error correction and resumes execution afterward. In contrast to regular ECC-DRAM, which remains exploitable if more than 2 bits are flipped, CSI:Rowhammer maintains the security level of the cryptographic MAC. Under normal conditions, we see latency overheads below 0.75% and no memory overhead compared to off-the-shelf ECC-DRAM. CSI:Rowhammer can detect any number of bitflips with overwhelming probability and correct at least eight bitflips in practical time constraints.
#rowhammer #hardware #security #talk
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