FlippyR.AM: The large-scale Rowhammer study

Rowhammer is a disturbance effect in computer memory (DRAM) first published in 2014. When an attacker accesses carefully selected addresses, bits can flip in adjacent memory cells not accessed by the attacker. Depending on which information is stored in the cells, Rowhammer can be exploited to escalate privileges on desktop computers, mobile devices, and cloud servers. Since the first exploit publication in 2015, a cat-and-mouse game has started between new mitigations helping against known attacks and new attacks bypassing known mitigations.

In their talk “Ten Years of Rowhammer: A Retrospect and Path to the Future”, the researchers gave an overview on the basics of Rowhammer and the results of Rowhammer research in the last decade. They showed that the systems tested by researchers are very limited. Mostly, lab systems were tested with small sample sizes: Most of the analysed studies tested only one system. Therefore, it is unknown how big the problem of Rowhammer is in real-world systems that are actually used, and more research is needed.

However, it is unfeasible to test hundreds or thousands of systems. Also, these systems would be lab systems as well when used for research. Therefore, Daniel, Martin and Florian started the FlippyR.AM large-scale study where they ask people to test if their systems are affected by Rowhammer.