Stefan Saroiu

"Are We Susceptible to Rowhammer? An End-to-End Methodology for Cloud Providers"

( MPI-SWS talk in Kooperation mit dem Fachbereich Informatik)

Cloud providers are nervous about recent research showing how Rowhammer attacks affect many types of DRAM including DDR4 and ECC-equipped DRAM. Unfortunately, cloud providers lack a systematic way to test the DRAM present in their servers for the threat of a Rowhammer attack. Building such a methodology needs to overcome two difficult challenges: (1) devising a CPU instruction sequence that maximizes the rate of DRAM row activations on a given system, and (2) determining the adjacency of rows internal to DRAM. This talk will present an end-to-end methodology that overcomes these challenges to determine if cloud servers are susceptible to Rowhammer attacks. With our methodology, a cloud provider can construct worst-case testing conditions for DRAM. We used our methodology to create worst-case DRAM testing conditions on the hardware used by a major cloud provider for a recent generation of its servers. Our findings show that none of the instruction sequences used in prior work to mount Rowhammer attacks create worst-case DRAM testing conditions. Instead, we construct an instruction sequence that issues non-explicit load and store instructions. Our new sequence leverages microarchitectural side-effects to ``hammer'' DRAM at a near-optimal rate on modern Skylake platforms. We also designed a DDR4 fault injector capable of reverse engineering row adjacency inside a DRAM device. When applied to our cloud provider's DIMMs, we find that rows inside DDR4 DRAM devices do not always follow a linear map. Joint work with Lucian Cojocar (VU Amsterdam), Jeremie Kim, Minesh Patel, Onur Mutlu (ETH Zurich), Lily Tsai (MIT), and Alec Wolman (MSR)

Bio: Stefan Saroiu is a researcher in the Mobility and Networking Research group at Microsoft Research (MSR) in Redmond. Stefan's research interests span many aspects of systems and networks although his most recent work focuses on systems security. Stefan takes his work beyond publishing results. With his colleagues at MSR, he designed and built (1) the reference implementation of a software-based Trusted Platform Module (TPM) used in millions of smartphones and tablets, and (2) Microsoft Embedded Social, a cloud service aimed at user engagement in mobile apps that has 20 million users. Before joining MSR in 2008, Stefan spent three years as an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto, and four months at Amazon.com as a visiting researcher where he worked on the early designs of their new shopping cart system (aka Dynamo). Stefan is an ACM Distinguished Member.