Rowhammer is a hardware vulnerability in DDR memory by which attackers can perform specific access patterns in their own memory to flip bits in adjacent, uncontrolled rows with- out accessing them. Since its discovery by Kim et. al. (ISCA 2014), Rowhammer attacks have emerged as an alarming threat to numerous security mechanisms.
In this paper, we show that Rowhammer attacks can in fact be more effective when combined with bank-level parallelism, a technique in which the attacker hammers multiple memory banks simultaneously. This allows us to increase the amount of Rowhammer-induced flips 7-fold and significantly speed up prior Rowhammer attacks relying on native code execution.
Furthermore, we tackle the task of mounting browser-based Rowhammer attacks. Here, we develop a self-evicting ver- sion of multi-bank hammering, allowing us to replace clflush instructions with cache evictions. We then develop a novel method for detecting contiguous physical addresses using memory access timings, thereby obviating the need for trans- parent huge pages. Finally, by combining both techniques, we are the first, to our knowledge, to obtain Rowhammer bit flips on DDR4 memory from the Chrome and Firefox browsers running on default Linux configurations, without enabling transparent huge pages.
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This content will become publicly available on August 14, 2025
Go Go Gadget Hammer: Flipping Nested Pointers for Arbitrary Data Leakage
Rowhammer is an increasingly threatening vulnerability that grants an attacker the ability to flip bits in memory without directly accessing them. Despite efforts to mitigate Rowhammer via software and defenses built directly into DRAM modules, more recent generations of DRAM are actually more susceptible to malicious bit-flips than their predecessors. This phenomenon has spawned numerous exploits, showing how Rowhammer acts as the basis for various vulnerabilities that target sensitive structures, such as Page Table Entries (PTEs) or opcodes, to grant control over a victim machine.
However, in this paper, we consider Rowhammer as a more general vulnerability, presenting a novel exploit vector for Rowhammer that targets particular code patterns. We show that if victim code is designed to return benign data to an unprivileged user, and uses nested pointer dereferences, Rowhammer can flip these pointers to gain arbitrary read access in the victim's address space. Furthermore, we identify gadgets present in the Linux kernel, and demonstrate an end-to-end attack that precisely flips a targeted pointer. To do so we developed a number of improved Rowhammer primitives, including kernel memory massaging, Rowhammer synchronization, and testing for kernel flips, which may be of broader interest to the Rowhammer community. Compared to prior works' leakage rate of .3 bits/s, we show that such gadgets can be used to read out kernel data at a rate of 82.6 bits/s.
By targeting code gadgets, this work expands the scope and attack surface exposed by Rowhammer. It is no longer sufficient for software defenses to selectively pad previously exploited memory structures in flip-safe memory, as any victim code that follows the pattern in question must be protected.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2202317
- PAR ID:
- 10532320
- Publisher / Repository:
- Usenix Security
- Date Published:
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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