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Rowhammering Storage Devices

Published: 27 July 2021 Publication History

Abstract

Peripheral devices like SSDs are growing more complex, to the point they are effectively small computers themselves. Our position is that this trend creates a new kind of attack vector, where untrusted software could use peripherals strictly as intended to accomplish unintended goals. To exemplify, we set out to rowhammer the DRAM component of a simplified host-side FTL, issuing regular I/O requests that manage to flip bits in a way that triggers sensitive information leakage. We conclude that such attacks might soon be feasible, and we argue that systems need principled approaches for securing peripherals against them.

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  • (2024) Reviving Storage Systems Education in the 21 st Century — An experience report 2024 IEEE 24th International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud and Internet Computing (CCGrid)10.1109/CCGrid59990.2024.00074(616-625)Online publication date: 6-May-2024
  • (2023)A Deep Neural Network Attack Simulation against Data Storage of Autonomous VehiclesSAE International Journal of Connected and Automated Vehicles10.4271/12-07-02-00087:2Online publication date: 29-Sep-2023

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cover image ACM Conferences
HotStorage '21: Proceedings of the 13th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Storage and File Systems
July 2021
119 pages
ISBN:9781450385503
DOI:10.1145/3465332
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Published: 27 July 2021

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Author Tags

  1. DRAM memory
  2. filesystem
  3. reliability
  4. security
  5. solid state disk

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  • BSF

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Overall Acceptance Rate 34 of 87 submissions, 39%

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  • (2024) Reviving Storage Systems Education in the 21 st Century — An experience report 2024 IEEE 24th International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud and Internet Computing (CCGrid)10.1109/CCGrid59990.2024.00074(616-625)Online publication date: 6-May-2024
  • (2023)A Deep Neural Network Attack Simulation against Data Storage of Autonomous VehiclesSAE International Journal of Connected and Automated Vehicles10.4271/12-07-02-00087:2Online publication date: 29-Sep-2023

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