Read disturbance in modern DRAM chips is a widespread weakness that is used for breaking memory isolation, one of the fundamental building blocks of system security and privacy. RowHammer is a prime example of read disturbance in DRAM where repeatedly accessing (hammering) a row of DRAM cells (DRAM row) induces bitflips in physically nearby DRAM rows (victim rows). Unfortunately, shrinking technology node size exacerbates RowHammer and as such, significantly fewer accesses can induce bitflips in newer DRAM chip generations. To ensure robust DRAM operation, state-of-the-art mitigation mechanisms restore the charge in potential victim rows (i.e., they perform preventive refresh or charge restoration). With newer DRAM chip generations, these mechanisms perform preventive refresh more aggressively and cause larger performance, energy, or area overheads. Therefore, it is essential to develop a better understanding and in-depth insights into the preventive refresh to secure real DRAM chips at low cost. In this paper, our goal is to mitigate RowHammer at low cost by understanding the preventive refresh latency and the impact of reduced refresh latency on RowHammer. To this end, we present the first rigorous experimental study on the interactions between refresh latency and RowHammer characteristics in real DRAM chips. Our experimental characterization using 388 real DDR4 DRAM chips from three major manufacturers demonstrates that a preventive refresh latency can be significantly reduced (by 64%) at the expense of requiring slightly more (by 0.54%) preventive refreshes. To investigate the impact of reduced preventive refresh latency on system performance and energy efficiency, we reduce the preventive refresh latency and adjust the aggressiveness of existing RowHammer solutions by developing a new mechanism, Partial Charge Restoration for Aggressive Mitigation (PaCRAM). Our results show that by reducing the preventive refresh latency, PaCRAM reduces the performance and energy overheads induced by five state-of-the-art RowHammer mitigation mechanisms with small additional area overhead. Thus, PaCRAM introduces a novel perspective into addressing RowHammer vulnerability at low cost by leveraging our experimental observations. To aid future research, we open-source our PaCRAM implementation at https://github.com/CMU-SAFARI/PaCRAM.

We experimentally demonstrate the effects of read disturbance (RowHammer and RowPress) and uncover the inner workings of undocumented read disturbance defense mechanisms in High Bandwidth Memory (HBM). Detailed characterization of six real HBM2 DRAM chips in two different FPGA boards shows that (1) the read disturbance vulnerability significantly varies between different HBM2 chips and between different components (e.g., 3D-stacked channels) in-side a chip, (2) DRAM rows at the end and in the middle of a bank are more resilient to read disturbance, (3) fewer additional activations are sufficient to induce more read disturbance bitflips in a DRAM row if the row exhibits the first bitflip at a relatively high activation count, (4) a modern HBM2 chip implements undocumented read disturbance defenses that track potential aggressor rows based on how many times they are activated. We describe how our findings could be leveraged to develop more powerful read disturbance attacks and more efficient defense mechanisms. We open source all our code and data to facilitate future research at https://github.com/CMU-SAFARI/HBM-Read-Disturbance.

We experimentally analyze the computational capability of commercial off-the-shelf(COTS) DRAM chips and the robustness of these capabilities under various timing delays between DRAM commands, data patterns, temperature, and voltage levels. We extensively characterize 120 COTS DDR4 chips from two major manufacturers. We highlight four key results of our study. First, COTS DRAM chips are capable of 1) simultaneously activating up to 32 rows (i.e., simultaneous many-row activation), 2) executing a majority of X (MAJX) operation where X>3 (i.e., MAJ5, MAJ7, and MAJ9 operations), and 3) copying a DRAM row (concurrently) to up to 31 other DRAM rows, which we call Multi-RowCopy. Second, storing multiple copies of MAJX's input operands on all simultaneously activated rows drastically increases the success rate (i.e., the percentage of DRAM cells that correctly perform the computation) of the MAJX operation. For example, MAJ3 with 32-row activation (i.e., replicating each MAJ3's input operands 10 times) has a 30.81% higher average success rate than MAJ3 with 4-row activation (i.e., no replication). Third, data pattern affects the success rate of MAJX and MUlti-RowCopy operations by 11.52% and 0.07% on average. Fourth, simultaneous many-row activation, MAJX, and Multi-RowCopy operations are highly resilient to temperature and voltage changes, with small success rate variations of at most 2.13% among all tested operations. We believe these empirical results demonstrate the promising potential of using DRAM as a computation substrate. To aid future research and development, we open-source our infrastructure at https://github.com/CMU-SAFARI/SiMRA-DRAM.

DRAM chips are increasingly more vulnerable to read-disturbance phenomena (e.g., RowHammer and RowPress), where repeatedly accessing DRAM rows causes bitflips in nearby rows due to DRAM density scaling. Under low RowHammer thresholds, existing RowHammer mitigations either incur high area overheads or degrade performance significantly. We propose a new RowHammer mitigation mechanism, CoMeT, that prevents RowHammer bitflips with low area, performance, and energy costs in DRAM-based systems at very low RowHammer thresholds. The key idea of CoMeT is to use low-cost and scalable hash-based counters to track DRAM row activations. CoMeT uses the Count-Min Sketch technique that maps each DRAM row to a group of counters, as uniquely as possible, using multiple hash functions. When a DRAM row is activated, CoMeT increments the counters mapped to that DRAM row. Because the mapping from DRAM rows to counters is not completely unique, activating one row can increment one or more counters mapped to another row. Thus, CoMeT may overestimate, but never underestimates, a DRAM row's activation count. This property of CoMeT allows it to securely prevent RowHammer bitflips while properly configuring its hash functions reduces overestimations. As a result, CoMeT 1) implements substantially fewer counters (e.g., thousands of counters) than the number of DRAM rows in a DRAM bank (e.g., 128K rows) and 2) does not significantly overestimate a DRAM row's activation count. We demonstrate that CoMeT securely prevents RowHammer bitflips at low area, performance, and energy cost. Our comprehensive evaluations show that CoMeT prevents RowHammer bitflips with an average performance overhead of only 0.19% and 4.01 % across 61 benign single-core workloads for a RowHammer threshold of 1K and a very low RowHammer threshold of 125, respectively, normalized to a system with no RowHammer mitigation. CoMeT achieves a good trade-off between performance, energy, and area overheads. Compared to the best prior performance- and energy-efficient RowHammer mitigation mechanism, CoMeT requires 5.4x and 74.2x less area overhead at RowHammer thresholds of 1K and 125, respectively, and incurs a small (≤ 1.75%) performance overhead on average, for all RowHammer thresholds. Compared to the best prior low-area-cost mitigation mechanism, at a very low RowHammer threshold of 125, CoMeT improves performance by up to 39.1% while incurring a similar area overhead. CoMeT is openly and freely available at https://github.com/CMU-SAFARI/CoMeT.

Read disturbance in modern DRAM chips is a widespread phenomenon and is reliably used for breaking memory isolation, a fundamental building block for building robust systems. RowHammer and RowPress are two examples of read disturbance in DRAM where repeatedly accessing (hammering) or keeping active (pressing) a memory location induces bitflips in other memory locations. Unfortunately, shrinking technology node size exacerbates read disturbance in DRAM chips over generations. As a result, existing defense mechanisms suffer from significant performance and energy overheads, limited effectiveness, or prohibitively high hardware complexity. In this paper, we tackle these shortcomings by leveraging the spatial variation in read disturbance across different memory locations in real DRAM chips. To do so, we 1) present the first rigorous real DRAM chip characterization study of spatial variation of read disturbance and 2) propose Svärd, a new mechanism that dynamically adapts the aggressiveness of existing solutions based on the row-level read disturbance profile. Our experimental characterization on 144 real DDR4 DRAM chips representing 11 die revisions demonstrates a large variation in read disturbance vulnerability across different memory locations: in the part of memory with the worst read disturbance vulnerability, 1) up to 2 × the number of bitflips can occur and 2) bitflips can occur at an order of magnitude fewer accesses, compared to the memory locations with the least vulnerability to read disturbance. Svärd leverages this variation to reduce the overheads of five state-of-the-art read disturbance solutions, and thus significantly increases system performance.

Processing-using-DRAM (PuD) is an emerging paradigm that leverages the analog operational properties of DRAM circuitry to enable massively parallel in-DRAM computation. PuD has the potential to significantly reduce or eliminate costly data movement between processing elements and main memory. A common approach for PuD architectures is to make use of bulk bitwise computation (e.g., AND, OR, NOT). Prior works experimentally demonstrate three-input MAJ (i.e., MAJ3) and two-input AND and OR operations in commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) DRAM chips. Yet, demonstrations on COTS DRAM chips do not provide a functionally complete set of operations (e.g., NAND or AND and NOT). We experimentally df performing 1) functionally-complete Boolean operations: NOT, NAND, and NOR and 2) many-input (i.e., more than two-input) AND and OR operations. We present an extensive characterization of new bulk bitwise operations in 256 off-theshelf modern DDR4 DRAM chips. We evaluate the reliability of these operations using a metric called success rate: the fraction of correctly performed bitwise operations. Among our 19 new observations, we highlight four major results. First, we can perform the NOT operation on COTS DRAM chips with a 98.37% success rate on average. Second, we can perform up to 16-input NAND, NOR, AND, and OR operations on COTS DRAM chips with high reliability (e.g., 16-input NAND, NOR, AND, and OR with an average success rate of 94.94%, 95.87%, 94.94%, and 95.85%, respectively). Third, data pattern only slightly affects NAND, NOR, AND, and OR operations. Our results show that executing NAND, NOR, AND, and OR operations with random data patterns decreases the success rate compared to all logic-1/logic-0 patterns by 1.39%, 1.97%, 1.43%, and 1.98%, respectively. Fourth, NOT, NAND, NOR, AND, and OR operations are highly resilient to temperature changes, with small success rate fluctuations of at most 1.66% among all the tested operations when the temperature is increased from 50°C to 95°C. We believe these empirical results demonstrate the promising potential of using DRAM as a computation substrate.

RowHammer is a major read disturbance mechanism in DRAM where repeatedly accessing (hammering) a row of DRAM cells (DRAM row) induces bitflips in other physically nearby DRAM rows. RowHammer solutions perform preventive actions (e.g., refresh neighbor rows of the hammered row) that mitigate such bitflips to preserve memory isolation, a fundamental building block of security and privacy in modern computing systems. However, preventive actions induce non-negligible memory request latency and system performance overheads as they interfere with memory requests. As shrinking technology node size over DRAM chip generations exacerbates RowHammer, the overheads of RowHammer solutions become prohibitively expensive. As a result, a malicious program can effectively hog the memory system and deny service to benign applications by causing many RowHammer-preventive actions. In this work, we tackle the performance overheads of RowHammer solutions by tracking and throttling the generators of memory accesses that trigger RowHammer solutions. To this end, we propose BreakHammer. BreakHammer 1) observes the time-consuming RowHammer-preventive actions of existing RowHammer mitigation mechanisms, 2) identifies hardware threads that trigger many of these actions, and 3) reduces the memory bandwidth usage of each identified thread. As such, BreakHammer significantly reduces the number of RowHammer-preventive actions performed, thereby improving 1) system performance and DRAM energy, and 2) reducing the maximum slowdown induced on a benign application, with near-zero area overhead. Our extensive evaluations demonstrate that BreakHammer effectively reduces the negative performance, energy, and fairness effects of eight RowHammer mitigation mechanisms. To foster further research we open-source our BreakHammer implementation and scripts at https://github.com/CMU-SAFARI/BreakHammer.

Modern computing systems access data in main memory at coarse granularity (e.g., at 512-bit cache block granularity). Coarse-grained access leads to wasted energy because the system does not use all individually accessed small portions (e.g., words , each of which typically is 64 bits) of a cache block. In modern DRAM-based computing systems, two key coarse-grained access mechanisms lead to wasted energy: large and fixed-size (i) data transfers between DRAM and the memory controller and (ii) DRAM row activations. We propose Sectored DRAM, a new, low-overhead DRAM substrate that reduces wasted energy by enabling fine-grained DRAM data transfer and DRAM row activation. To retrieve only useful data from DRAM, Sectored DRAM exploits the observation that many cache blocks are not fully utilized in many workloads due to poor spatial locality. Sectored DRAM predicts the words in a cache block that will likely be accessed during the cache block’s residency in cache and (i) transfers only the predicted words on the memory channel by dynamically tailoring the DRAM data transfer size for the workload and (ii) activates a smaller set of cells that contain the predicted words by carefully operating physically isolated portions of DRAM rows (i.e., mats). Activating a smaller set of cells on each access relaxes DRAM power delivery constraints and allows the memory controller to schedule DRAM accesses faster. We evaluate Sectored DRAM using 41 workloads from widely used benchmark suites. Compared to a system with coarse-grained DRAM, Sectored DRAM reduces the DRAM energy consumption of highly memory intensive workloads by up to (on average) 33% (20%) while improving their performance by up to (on average) 36% (17%). Sectored DRAM’s DRAM energy savings, combined with its system performance improvement, allows system-wide energy savings of up to 23%. Sectored DRAM’s DRAM chip area overhead is 1.7% of the area of a modern DDR4 chip. Compared to state-of-the-art fine-grained DRAM architectures, Sectored DRAM greatly reduces DRAM energy consumption, does not reduce DRAM bandwidth, and can be implemented with low hardware cost. Sectored DRAM provides 89% of the performance benefits of, consumes 12% less DRAM energy than, and takes up 34% less DRAM chip area than a high-performance state-of-the-art fine-grained DRAM architecture (Half-DRAM). It is our hope and belief that Sectored DRAM’s ideas and results will help to enable more efficient and high-performance memory systems. To this end, we open source Sectored DRAM at https://github.com/CMU-SAFARI/Sectored-DRAM.

Instruction injections or soft errors during execution on the CPU can cause serious system vulnerabilities. During the standard program flow of the processor, the injection of unauthorized instruction or the occurrence of an error in the expected instruction are the main conditions for potentially serious such vulnerabilities. With the execution of these unauthorized instructions, adversaries could exploit SoC and execute their own malicious program or get higher-level privileges on the system. On the other hand, non-intentional errors can potentially corrupt programs causing unintended executions or the cause of program crashes. Modern trusted architectures propose solutions for unauthorized execution on SoC with additional software mechanisms or extra hardware logic on the same untrusted SoC. Nevertheless, these SoCs can still be vulnerable, as long as deployed security detection mechanisms are embedded within the same SoC’s fabric. Furthermore, validation mechanisms on the SoC increase the complexity and power consumption of the SoC. This paper presents DEV-PIM, a new, high-performance, and low-cost execution validation mechanism in SoCs with external DRAM memory. The proposed approach uses processing-in-memory (PIM) method to detect instruction injections or corrupted instructions by utilising basic computing resources on a standard DRAM device. DEV-PIM transfers instructions scheduled for execution on the CPU to the DRAM and validates them by comparing content with the trusted program record on the DRAM using PIM operations. By optimising the DRAM scheduling process validation tasks are only executed when memory access is idle. The CPU retains uninterrupted memory access and can continue its normal program flow without penalty. We evaluate DEV-PIM in an end-to-end DRAM-compatible environment and run a set of software benchmarks. On average, the proposed architecture is able to detect 98.46% of instruction injections for different validation. We also measured on average only 0.346% CPU execution overhead with DEV-PIM enabled.

Memory isolation is critical for system reliability, security, and safety. Unfortunately, read disturbance can break memory isolation in modern DRAM chips. For example, RowHammer is awell-studied read-disturb phenomenon where repeatedly opening and closing (i.e., hammering) a DRAM row many times causes bitflips in physically nearby rows.

To understand and improve DRAM performance, reliability, security, and energy efficiency, prior works study characteristics of commodity DRAM chips. Unfortunately, state-of-the-art open source infrastructures capable of conducting such studies are obsolete, poorly supported, or difficult to use, or their inflexibility limits the types of studies they can conduct. We propose DRAM Bender, a new FPGA-based infrastructure that enables experimental studies on state-of-the-art DRAM chips. DRAM Bender offers three key features at the same time. First, DRAM Bender enables directly interfacing with a DRAM chip through its low-level interface. This allows users to issue DRAM commands in arbitrary order and with finer-grained time intervals compared to other open source infrastructures. Second, DRAM Bender exposes easy-to-use C++ and Python programm ing interfaces, allowing users to quickly and easily develop different types of DRAM experiments. Third, DRAM Bender is easily extensible. The modular design of DRAM Bender allows extending it to: 1) support existing and emerging DRAM interfaces and 2) run on new commercial or custom FPGA boards with little effort. To demonstrate that DRAM Bender is a versatile infrastructure, we conduct three case studies, two of which lead to new observations about the DRAM RowHammer vulnerability. In particular, we show that data patterns supported by DRAM Bender uncover a larger set of bit-flips on a victim row than those commonly used by prior work. We demonstrate the extensibility of DRAM Bender by implementing it on five different FPGAs with DDR4 and DDR3 support. DRAM Bender is freely and openly available athttps://github.com/CMU-SAFARI/DRAM-Bender.

The RowHammer vulnerability in DRAM is a critical threat to system security. To protect against RowHammer, vendors commit to security-through-obscurity: modern DRAM chips rely on undocumented, proprietary, on-die mitigations, commonly known as Target Row Refresh (TRR). At a high level, TRR detects and refreshes potential RowHammer-victim rows, but its exact implementations are not openly disclosed. Security guarantees of TRR mechanisms cannot be easily studied due to their proprietary nature.