Anti-Rowhammer IP
Rowhammer attacks targeting commonly used memory IPs have become a security risk in recent years. Rowhammer attacks allow the attacker to influence bits in RAM by repeatedly accessing neighboring memory rows, or by “hammering” neighboring rows.
Improved version of Rowhammer, called “RAMBleed” allows the attacker not only to change, but to deduce the bit values of the attacked memory row. This attack can be leveraged to retrieve, for example, encryption keys, and therefore constitutes a serious security risk.
To prevent this risk, Secure-IC provides the Anti-Rowhammer IP.
Anti-Rowhammer IP for memory security offers the following features:
Anti-Rowhammer IP provides a feature to detect and prevent Rowhammer attempts. Detection is performed by analyzing the access history. After an attack attempt is detected, the memory can be forced to refresh, preventing the attack. In addition, to prevent easy identification of victim rows, Anti-Rowhammer IP performs preventative functions to hide the row address from the attacker. This significantly reduces the attack surface for the attacker.
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Detection
Since the Rowhammer attack relies on accessing the same rows in a repeated manner, detection can be performed by analyzing the addresses access history. Anti-Rowhammer IP analyzes the access history and forces a memory refresh when suspicious access patterns are found.
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Prevention
Active Rowhammer prevention can be achieved with active address scrambling. This creates a separation between the address space used in the RAM access side from the physical access space in the physical RAM. This makes the selection of neighboring rows to “hammer” much more difficult for the attacker, and thus further thwarts attempts at Rowhammer attacks.
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Integration features
Anti-Rowhammer IP can be adjusted to meet resource limitations or performance requirements. Anti-Rowhammer IP is not dependent on any hardware technology type or memory IP, making it easy to integrate into existing memory designs.