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Security: It Isn’t Only Software — Hardware Can Be Vulnerable Too
Rowhammer is a vulnerability in lower end DRAM memory chips that can be used by hackers to exploit computers. The memory chip is attacked by forcing the same small piece of data to be read over and over. That small area of memory is “hammered” until ultimately there is an excess electrical charge that “leaks” to adjacent areas in memory which then can cause the adjacent memory to “flip” or change the values that it held.
Changing a bit from 0 to 1 doesn’t seem like it would provide enough leverage to exploit the machine, but skilled hackers are able to use this technique to ultimately take control of computer servers and routers.
A team of researchers from Google found that “as an electrical coupling phenomenon within the silicon itself, Rowhammer allows the potential bypass of hardware and software memory protection policies. This can allow untrusted code to break out of its sandbox and take full control of the system”.
Rowhammer is becoming a more serious problem because memory is shrinking and enabling, squeezing the memory cells closer and closer together. And researchers have studied this type of attack method and have become very adept at being able to apply it. They’ve found that the attack can even be launched from Javascript. Browsers running Javascript can become the entryway for Rowhammer attacks.
The speed of processors like GPUs can accelerate the attacks. One test was able to launch a browser-based attacke and break into a smartphone in less than two minutes.
Onur Mutlu, professor at ETH Zurich, wrote that “as systems security researchers understand more about RowHammer, and as the RowHammer phenomenon continues to fundamentally affect memory chips due to technology scaling problems, researchers and practitioners will develop different types of attacks to exploit RowHammer in various contexts and in many more creative ways. RowHammer is a critical problem that manifests in the difficulties in DRAM scaling and is expected to only become worse in the future.”
