TRRespass won the best paper award at the Security and Privacy conference last week. TRRespass sheds light on the little-known Target Row Refresh protection that is supposed to protect systems against Rowhammer bit flips.
The paper shows for the first time that recent systems employ the mitigation inside DRAM chips. A deep analysis shows that these TRR mitigations can be bypassed by a new variant which we call many-sided Rowhammer. Unlike CPU vulnerabilities that can often be fixed with a microcode patch, the issues uncovered by TRRespass will unfortunately stay with us for many years to come. At COMSEC, we are working on effective mitigations against TRRespass and similar attacks.
TRRespass was highlighted in the news back in March. Some examples: Hacker News, Naked Security, Tom’s Hardware, Bleeping Computer.