Modern DRAM devices (PC-DDR4, LPDDR4X) are affected by a vulnerability in their internal Target Row Refresh (TRR) mitigation against Rowhammer attacks. Novel non-uniform Rowhammer access patterns, consisting of aggressors with different frequencies, phases, and amplitudes allow triggering bit flips on affected memory modules using our Blacksmith fuzzer. The patterns generated by Blacksmith were able to trigger bitflips on all 40 PC-DDR4 DRAM devices in our test pool, which cover the three major DRAM manufacturers: Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron. This means that, even when chips advertised as Rowhammer-free are used, attackers may still be able to exploit Rowhammer. For example, this enables privilege-escalation attacks against the kernel or binaries such as the sudo binary, and also triggering bit flips in RSA-2048 keys (e.g., SSH keys) to gain cross-tenant virtual-machine access. We can confirm that DRAM devices acquired in July 2020 with DRAM chips from all three major DRAM vendors (Samsung, SK Hynix, Micron) are affected by this vulnerability. For more details, please refer to our publication.
References
Link | Resource |
---|---|
https://comsec.ethz.ch/research/dram/blacksmith/ | Exploit Third Party Advisory |
https://comsec.ethz.ch/wp-content/files/blacksmith_sp22.pdf | Exploit Third Party Advisory |
https://github.com/comsec-group/blacksmith | Exploit Third Party Advisory |
History
No history.
MITRE Information
Status: PUBLISHED
Assigner: NCSC.ch
Published: 2021-11-15T00:00:00
Updated: 2021-11-16T12:47:09
Reserved: 2021-10-08T00:00:00
Link: CVE-2021-42114
JSON object: View
NVD Information
Status : Analyzed
Published: 2021-11-16T12:15:06.817
Modified: 2021-11-29T18:45:27.197
Link: CVE-2021-42114
JSON object: View
Redhat Information
No data.
CWE