SMASH: Synchronized Many-Sided Rowhammer Attacks from Javascript
SMASH: Synchronized Many-sided Rowhammer Attacks from JavaScript Finn de Ridder Pietro Frigo Emanuele Vannacci Herbert Bos ETH Zurich VU Amsterdam VU Amsterdam VU Amsterdam VU Amsterdam Cristiano Giuffrida Kaveh Razavi VU Amsterdam ETH Zurich Abstract has instead been lagging behind. In particular, rather than Despite their in-DRAM Target Row Refresh (TRR) mitiga- addressing the root cause of the Rowhammer bug, DDR4 in- tions, some of the most recent DDR4 modules are still vul- troduced a mitigation known as Target Row Refresh (TRR). nerable to many-sided Rowhammer bit flips. While these TRR, however, has already been shown to be ineffective bit flips are exploitable from native code, triggering them against many-sided Rowhammer attacks from native code, in the browser from JavaScript faces three nontrivial chal- at least in its current in-DRAM form [12]. However, it is lenges. First, given the lack of cache flushing instructions in unclear whether TRR’s failing also re-exposes end users to JavaScript, existing eviction-based Rowhammer attacks are TRR-aware, JavaScript-based Rowhammer attacks from the already slow for the older single- or double-sided variants browser. In fact, existing many-sided Rowhammer attacks and thus not always effective. With many-sided Rowhammer, require frequent cache flushes, large physically-contiguous mounting effective attacks is even more challenging, as it re- regions, and certain access patterns to bypass in-DRAM TRR, quires the eviction of many different aggressor addresses from all challenging in JavaScript. the CPU caches. Second, the most effective many-sided vari- In this paper, we show that under realistic assumptions, it ants, known as n-sided, require large physically-contiguous is indeed possible to bypass TRR directly from JavaScript, memory regions which are not available in JavaScript.
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