Rowhammer | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

NVIDIA is urging customers to enable System-level Error Correction Codes (ECC) as a defense against a variant of a RowHammer attack demonstrated against its graphics processing units (GPUs). "Risk of successful exploitation from RowHammer attacks varies based on DRAM device, platform, design specification, and system settings," the GPU maker said in an advisory released this week. Dubbed GPUHammer , the attacks mark the first-ever RowHammer exploit demonstrated against NVIDIA's GPUs (e.g., NVIDIA A6000 GPU with GDDR6 Memory), causing malicious GPU users to tamper with other users' data by triggering bit flips in GPU memory. The most concerning consequence of this behavior, University of Toronto researchers found, is the degradation of an artificial intelligence (AI) model's accuracy from 80% to less than 1%. RowHammer is to modern DRAMs just like how Spectre and Meltdown are to contemporary CPUs. While both are hardware-level security vulnerabilities, Row...

Cybersecurity researchers from ETH Zurich have developed a new variant of the RowHammer DRAM (dynamic random-access memory) attack that, for the first time, successfully works against AMD Zen 2 and Zen 3 systems despite mitigations such as Target Row Refresh (TRR). "This result proves that AMD systems are equally vulnerable to Rowhammer as Intel systems, which greatly increases the attack surface, considering today's AMD market share of around 36% on x86 desktop CPUs," the researchers  said . The technique has been codenamed  ZenHammer , which can also trigger RowHammer bit flips on DDR5 devices for the first time. RowHammer , first publicly disclosed in 2014, is a  well-known attack  that exploits DRAM's memory cell architecture to alter data by repeatedly accessing a specific row (aka hammering) to cause the electrical charge of a cell to leak to adjacent cells. This can induce random bit flips in neighboring memory rows (from 0 to 1, or vice versa), which can...

A team of security researchers from Google has demonstrated yet another variant of the Rowhammer vulnerability that targets increasingly smaller DRAM chips to bypass all current mitigations, making it a persistent threat to chip security. Dubbed "Half-Double," the new hammering technique hinges on the weak coupling between two memory rows that are not immediately adjacent to each other but one row removed in an attempt to tamper with data stored in memory and attack a system . "Unlike  TRRespass , which exploits the blind spots of manufacturer-dependent defenses, Half-Double is an intrinsic property of the underlying silicon substrate," the researchers  noted . "This is likely an indication that the electrical coupling responsible for Rowhammer is a property of distance, effectively becoming stronger and longer-ranged as cell geometries shrink down. Distances greater than two are conceivable." Rowhammer attacks are similar to  speculative execution  ...

Academics from Vrije University in Amsterdam and ETH Zurich have published a new research paper describing yet another variation of the Rowhammer attack. Dubbed  SMASH  (Synchronized MAny-Sided Hammering), the technique can be used to successfully trigger the attack from JavaScript on modern DDR4 RAM cards, notwithstanding extensive mitigations that have been put in place by manufacturers over the last seven years. "Despite their in-DRAM Target Row Refresh (TRR) mitigations, some of the most recent DDR4 modules are still vulnerable to many-sided Rowhammer bit flips," the researchers said.  "SMASH exploits high-level knowledge of cache replacement policies to generate optimal access patterns for eviction-based many-sided Rowhammer. To bypass the in-DRAM TRR mitigations, SMASH carefully schedules cache hits and misses to successfully trigger synchronized many-sided Rowhammer bit flips." By synchronizing memory requests with DRAM refresh commands, the researchers...