A Simulation-based Evaluation Framework for Inter-VM RowHammer Mitigation Techniques

TL;DR

This paper introduces a simulation framework to evaluate inter-VM RowHammer mitigation techniques across different hardware configurations, enabling comprehensive testing without the need for specific physical machines.

Contribution

It presents a novel simulation-based evaluation framework that accurately assesses mitigation techniques and their overhead across various DRAM address mappings.

Findings

Framework effectively reproduces existing mitigation techniques.

Enables evaluation of mitigation effectiveness across configurable hardware setups.

Facilitates cost-effective and comprehensive assessment of RowHammer defenses.

Abstract

Inter-VM RowHammer is an attack that induces a bitflip beyond the boundaries of virtual machines (VMs) to compromise a VM from another, and some software-based techniques have been proposed to mitigate this attack. Evaluating these mitigation techniques requires to confirm that they actually mitigate inter-VM RowHammer in low overhead. A challenge in this evaluation process is that both the mitigation ability and the overhead depend on the underlying hardware whose DRAM address mappings are different from machine to machine. This makes comprehensive evaluation prohibitively costly or even implausible as no machine that has a specific DRAM address mapping might be available. To tackle this challenge, we propose a simulation-based framework to evaluate software-based inter-VM RowHammer mitigation techniques across configurable DRAM address mappings. We demonstrate how to reproduce existing mitigation techniques on our framework, and show that it can evaluate the mitigation abilities and performance overhead of them with configurable DRAM address mappings.