# On the Thermal Vulnerability of 3D-Stacked High-Bandwidth Memory Architectures

## TL;DR

This paper explores the thermal vulnerabilities of 3D-stacked High Bandwidth Memory architectures, revealing how adversaries can exploit vertical and lateral adjacency to induce thermal attacks that degrade performance without detection.

## Contribution

It introduces the concept of thermal performance degradation attacks on 3D HBM architectures, highlighting a new security concern related to thermal side-channel vulnerabilities.

## Key findings

- Adversaries can inject heat pulses to create damaging thermal waves.
- Thermal attacks can bypass security tests and OS policies.
- Attacks mimic legitimate workloads, making detection difficult.

## Abstract

3D-stacked High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) architectures provide high-performance memory interactions to address the well-known performance challenge, namely the memory wall. However, these architectures are susceptible to thermal vulnerabilities due to the inherent vertical adjacency that occurs during the manufacturing process of HBM architectures. We anticipate that adversaries may exploit the intense vertical and lateral adjacency to design and develop thermal performance degradation attacks on the memory banks that host data/instructions from victim applications. In such attacks, the adversary manages to inject short and intense heat pulses from vertically and/or laterally adjacent memory banks, creating a convergent thermal wave that maximizes impact and delays the victim application from accessing its data/instructions. As the attacking application does not access any out-of-range memory locations, it can bypass both design-time security tests and the operating system's memory management policies. In other words, since the attack mimics legitimate workloads, it will be challenging to detect.