ZenHammer: Rowhammer Attacks on AMD Zen-based Platforms
Patrick Jattke
33rd USENIX Security Symposium · Day 1 · USENIX Security '24
For over a decade, AMD has steadily increased its market share in the x86 CPU landscape, with roughly one-third of all x86 CPUs sold today originating from the company. Despite this significant presence, academic and industry research into **Rowhammer** attacks on AMD's Zen-based platforms has been notably scarce since their initial release in 2017. This gap in research left a critical question unanswered: are AMD Zen systems vulnerable to Rowhammer, a pervasive memory disturbance error that has plagued Intel platforms for years?
AI review
This research definitively proves AMD Zen platforms are vulnerable to Rowhammer, reverse-engineering critical DRAM address mappings and demonstrating an end-to-end root exploit. The discovery of high bit flip rates on Zen 3 and the first DDR5 flips on Zen 4 are pivotal, demanding immediate attention from hardware manufacturers and security practitioners.