The Present Threat of Row Hammer Attacks

In 2014 Google researchers discovered strange interference between memory locations in DDR3, DDR4, and DDR5 Random Access Memory (RAM.) On closer inspection the team discovered that repeated access to memory addresses at high volume could create residual magnetic disturbances strong enough to alter data in physically adjacent memory. This project caused a landslide of research on attack vectors that spanned from privilege escalation and sandbox escapes to remote code execution over a network. Despite numerous attempts to fix the problem, row hammer remains a modern difficult to protect…