BreakHammer: Enhancing RowHammer Mitigations by Carefully Throttling Suspect Threads
O\u{g}uzhan Canpolat, A. Giray Ya\u{g}l{\i}k\c{c}{\i}, Ataberk Olgun,, \.Ismail Emir Y\"uksel, Yahya Can Tu\u{g}rul, Konstantinos Kanellopoulos,, O\u{g}uz Ergin, Onur Mutlu

TL;DR
BreakHammer is a hardware-based approach that reduces the performance and energy overheads of RowHammer mitigations by throttling suspect threads, leading to improved system performance and fairness with minimal area overhead.
Contribution
It introduces BreakHammer, a novel method to identify and throttle threads causing excessive RowHammer mitigation actions, significantly reducing their frequency and associated overheads.
Findings
Reduces the number of RowHammer preventive actions by up to 50%
Improves system performance and energy efficiency
Maintains near-zero area overhead
Abstract
RowHammer is a major read disturbance mechanism in DRAM where repeatedly accessing (hammering) a row of DRAM cells (DRAM row) induces bitflips in other physically nearby DRAM rows. RowHammer solutions perform preventive actions (e.g., refresh neighbor rows of the hammered row) that mitigate such bitflips to preserve memory isolation, a fundamental building block of security and privacy in modern computing systems. However, preventive actions induce non-negligible memory request latency and system performance overheads as they interfere with memory requests. As shrinking technology node size over DRAM chip generations exacerbates RowHammer, the overheads of RowHammer solutions become prohibitively expensive. As a result, a malicious program can effectively hog the memory system and deny service to benign applications by causing many RowHammer-preventive actions. In this work, we tackle…
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Taxonomy
TopicsPhysical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and Hardware Security · Advanced Malware Detection Techniques · Cryptographic Implementations and Security
