Rapid detection of rowhammer attacks using dynamic skewed hash tree
Saru Vig, Sarani Bhattacharya, Debdeep Mukhopadhyay, Siew-Kei Lam · 2018
RowHammer attacks pose a security threat to DRAM chips by causing bit-flips in sensitive memory regions. We propose a technique that combines a sliding window protocol and a dynamic integrity tree to rapidly detect multiple bit-flips caused by RowHammer attacks. Sliding window protocol monitors the frequent accesses made to the same bank in short intervals to identify the vulnerable rows. Dynamic integrity tree relies on SHA-3 Keccak hash function while maintaining the minimal number of vulnerable rows at any particular time to enable detection of bit flips. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach by performing RowHammer attacks using the prime and probe method with a DDR3 DRAM. We show that the dynamic tree structure only needs to maintain a small number of vulnerable rows at a time, thus notably reducing the height of the integrity tree to enable rapid detection of the bit-flips.