Triggering Rowhammer Hardware Faults on ARM
Zhenkai Zhang, Zihao Zhan, Daniel Balasubramanian, Xenofon Koutsoukos, Gábor Karsai · 2018
The rowhammer bug belongs to software-induced hardware faults, and has posed great security challenges to numerous systems. On x86, many approaches to triggering the rowhammer bug have been found; yet, due to several different reasons, the number of discovered approaches on ARM is limited. In this paper, we revisit the problem of how to trigger the rowhammer bug on ARM-based devices by carefully investigating whether it is possible to translate the original x86-oriented rowhammer approaches to ARM. We provide a thorough study of the unprivileged ARMv8-A cache maintenance instructions and give two previously overlooked reasons to support their use in rowhammer attacks. Moreover, we present a previously undiscovered instruction that can be exploited to trigger the rowhammer bug on many ARM-based devices. A potential approach to quickly evicting ARM CPU caches is also discussed, and experimental evaluations are carried out to show the effectiveness of our findings.