Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

CTOnews.com, October 21 (Xinhua) Swiss security experts have recently discovered a new type of attack against DRAM, which cannot be resisted at this stage. There is no evidence that hackers have launched attacks in this way, but experts urge memory manufacturers to take action as soon as possible.

Image source: Pixabay

This new attack is associated with the RowHammer method discovered in 2015, in which user-level applications may destroy, modify or steal sensitive data by repeatedly accessing areas of new DDR memory.

Over the next few years, memory chipmakers scrambled to develop defenses against attacks, mainly by limiting the number of times the program opened and closed the target chip area at a given time.

Under the leadership of Professor Onur Mutlu, the research team of the Federal Institute of Technology Zurich delved into the DRAM module and devised a new way to read the relevant content, even on the DDR4 memory equipped with the corresponding protection, by inducing bit flipping (numeric changes of 0 and 1) for longer than normal.

"We have shown a proof-of-concept RowPress program that can cause bitflip in real systems that already have protection against RowHammer," Mutlu said in the paper.

This is not an attack in itself, but malicious attackers implement a variety of attacks on this basis by inducing more bit flipping.

The main problem is that RowPress attacks are more cost-effective than RowHammer attacks. The number of activated RowPress attacks is only 1/10 or 1% of that of RowHammer.

And this type of attack is more difficult to detect. To solve this problem, the researchers say proprietary circuit solutions are needed to reduce the average performance of DRAM by at least 2%, and even need to be regulated in a range of applications.

Are manufacturers willing to make such a sacrifice? Samsung responded that it was exploring the possibility of protecting DDR4 memory modules from new attacks. Meguiar and SK Hynix did not comment at the time of writing.

CTOnews.com is attached with a link to the original article of the detailed report, which can be read in depth by interested users.

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