Abstract
A fundamental assumption in software security is that a memory location can only be modified by processes that may write to this memory location. However, a recent study has shown that parasitic effects in DRAM can change the content of a memory cell without accessing it, but by accessing other memory locations in a high frequency. This so-called Rowhammer bug occurs in most of today’s memory modules and has fatal consequences for the security of all affected systems, e.g., privilege escalation attacks.
All studies and attacks related to Rowhammer so far rely on the availability of a cache flush instruction in order to cause accesses to DRAM modules at a sufficiently high frequency. We overcome this limitation by defeating complex cache replacement policies. We show that caches can be forced into fast cache eviction to trigger the Rowhammer bug with only regular memory accesses. This allows to trigger the Rowhammer bug in highly restricted and even scripting environments.
We demonstrate a fully automated attack that requires nothing but a website with JavaScript to trigger faults on remote hardware. Thereby we can gain unrestricted access to systems of website visitors. We show that the attack works on off-the-shelf systems. Existing countermeasures fail to protect against this new Rowhammer attack.
C. Maurice—Part of the work was done while author was affiliated to Technicolor and Eurecom.
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Notes
- 1.
A draft of this paper was published online since July 24, 2015.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank our shepherd Stelios Sidiroglou-Douskos and our anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions. We would also like to thank Mark Seaborn, Thomas Dullien, Yossi Oren, Yuval Yarom, Barbara Aichinger, Peter Pessl and Raphael Spreitzer for feedback and advice.
Supported by the EU Horizon 2020 programme under GA No. 644052 (HECTOR), the EU FP7 programme under GA No. 610436 (MATTHEW), the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG) and Styrian Business Promotion Agency (SFG) under GA No. 836628 (SeCoS), and Cryptacus COST Action IC1403.
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Gruss, D., Maurice, C., Mangard, S. (2016). Rowhammer.js: A Remote Software-Induced Fault Attack in JavaScript. In: Caballero, J., Zurutuza, U., Rodríguez, R. (eds) Detection of Intrusions and Malware, and Vulnerability Assessment. DIMVA 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9721. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40667-1_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40667-1_15
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