DAPPER: A Performance-Attack-Resilient Tracker for RowHammer Defense
Jeonghyun Woo, Prashant J. Nair

TL;DR
DAPPER introduces a secure, low-cost tracking mechanism for RowHammer mitigation that resists performance attacks, maintaining system performance and security even at low thresholds.
Contribution
The paper presents DAPPER, a novel hashing-based tracker that is resilient to Perf-Attacks, enhancing RowHammer defenses with minimal performance overhead.
Findings
DAPPER-H achieves only 0.9% slowdown under attack.
DAPPER-H uses 96KB SRAM per 32GB DRAM.
Effective against both RowHammer and Perf-Attacks.
Abstract
RowHammer vulnerabilities pose a significant threat to modern DRAM-based systems, where rapid activation of DRAM rows can induce bit-flips in neighboring rows. To mitigate this, state-of-the-art host-side RowHammer mitigations typically rely on shared counters or tracking structures. While these optimizations benefit benign applications, they are vulnerable to Performance Attacks (Perf-Attacks), where adversaries exploit shared structures to reduce DRAM bandwidth for co-running benign applications by increasing DRAM accesses for RowHammer counters or triggering repetitive refreshes required for the early reset of structures, significantly degrading performance. In this paper, we propose secure hashing mechanisms to thwart adversarial attempts to capture the mapping of shared structures. We propose DAPPER, a novel low-cost tracker resilient to Perf-Attacks even at ultra-low RowHammer…
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Taxonomy
TopicsAdvanced Malware Detection Techniques · Network Security and Intrusion Detection · Information and Cyber Security
