Scientists have demonstrated how to use the Rowhammer attack (sometimes spelled Row Hammer) to flip bits in DDR4-based memory chips, a technique that can be used to leak or alter the content of a device's DRAM.
The
Rowhammer attack came to light in 2014, after researchers from Carnegie Mellon University proved that sending a barrage of 0s and 1s at a DRAM component, and more specifically at the same memory address, could cause electrical interferences that would affect nearby memory rows.
In
March 2015, Google researchers put the attack into an exploit and demonstrated its capabilities. The attack was novel nevertheless, still in its infancy, and it sparked further research on the topic, which was published in late July of the same year by different researchers.
This
second study revealed new ways to carry out the attacks via JavaScript, and the scientists discovered that almost all recent DRAM DDR3 chips were vulnerable to their technique.
