McSee: Evaluating Advanced Rowhammer Attacks and Defenses via Automated DRAM Traffic Analysis
Patrick Jattke
34th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security '25) · Day 3 · Hardware Security 3: Side-Channel and Fault Injection Attacks
Patrick Jattke's presentation at USENIX Security unveils **McSee**, a novel platform designed for the automated analysis of **DRAM** (Dynamic Random-Access Memory) traffic. The talk delves into the escalating "arms race" between advanced **Rowhammer** attacks and modern hardware defenses, particularly those introduced with the **DDR5** standard. McSee provides an unprecedented level of visibility into the low-level interactions between the memory controller and DRAM devices, allowing researchers to precisely evaluate the efficacy of sophisticated Rowhammer attack techniques like **sledgehammer** and **row press**, as well as the implementation and behavior of new DDR5 mitigation features such as **Refresh Management (RFM)** and **Probabilistic Row Refresh (PTR)**.
AI review
Jattke brings a hardware measurement platform that actually closes the empirical gap in Rowhammer research — no more arguing from simulation or vendor spec sheets, you're reading the real bus. The RFM non-adoption finding alone (zero RFM commands across Intel Alder Lake, Raptor Lake, and AMD Zen 4 despite DDR5 ostensibly supporting it) is the kind of uncomfortable ground truth that should embarrass multiple teams at Intel and AMD simultaneously.