JackHammer: Efficient Rowhammer on Heterogeneous FPGA-CPU Platforms
Zane Weissman, Thore Tiemann, Daniel Moghimi, Evan Custodio, Thomas, Eisenbarth, Berk Sunar

TL;DR
This paper introduces JackHammer, a novel FPGA-based Rowhammer attack that significantly outperforms CPU-based attacks in speed and effectiveness, highlighting security vulnerabilities in heterogeneous FPGA-CPU platforms.
Contribution
The work presents the first efficient FPGA-implemented Rowhammer attack, demonstrating its superiority over CPU attacks in speed and impact, and analyzing security implications for heterogeneous platforms.
Findings
FPGA-based Rowhammer can be twice as fast as CPU attacks.
JackHammer causes four times more bit flips than CPU attacks.
Successful fault injection on RSA signatures with JackHammer, 25% faster than CPU attacks.
Abstract
After years of development, FPGAs are finally making an appearance on multi-tenant cloud servers. These heterogeneous FPGA-CPU architectures break common assumptions about isolation and security boundaries. Since the FPGA and CPU architectures share hardware resources, a new class of vulnerabilities requires us to reassess the security and dependability of these platforms. In this work, we analyze the memory and cache subsystem and study Rowhammer and cache attacks enabled on two proposed heterogeneous FPGA-CPU platforms by Intel: the Arria 10 GX with an integrated FPGA-CPU platform, and the Arria 10 GX PAC expansion card which connects the FPGA to the CPU via the PCIe interface. We show that while Intel PACs currently are immune to cache attacks from FPGA to CPU, the integrated platform is indeed vulnerable to Prime and Probe style attacks from the FPGA to the CPU's last level cache.…
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Taxonomy
TopicsSecurity and Verification in Computing · Advanced Malware Detection Techniques · Cloud Data Security Solutions
