Memory bug that flips bits: the RowHammer story

Years ago researchers found a quiet problem in main memory that quietly flipped tiny bits, and it surprised many people. This issue, called RowHammer, made data change even when you never touched that data, by stressing nearby rows in DRAM. Many real systems were shown to be open to this trick; a simple user program could cause bit flips and make files wrong or crash a machine. Folks demonstrated that such flips could become a real security hole, letting attackers do bad things if they wanted. Fixing it wasn’t one single thing but a mix of small changes, some smart and cheap, some harder to roll out; industry and researchers kept working on it. The story keeps evolving, makers keep improving chips, yet clever people keep looking for new ways to attack memory. It’s a good reminder: tiny hardware quirks can turn into big problems, so watching the memory matters more than you might think, and this work changed how we build safer computers.

Read article comprehensive review in Paperium.net: Retrospective: Flipping Bits in Memory Without Accessing Them: An ExperimentalStudy of DRAM Disturbance Errors

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