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arXiv · 2102.10269

SoftTRR: Protect Page Tables Against RowHammer Attacks using Software-only Target Row Refresh

Zhi Zhang·Yueqiang Cheng·Minghua Wang·Wei He·Wenhao Wang·Nepal Surya·Yansong Gao·Kang Li·Zhe Wang·Chenggang Wu
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Abstract

Rowhammer attacks that corrupt level-1 page tables to gain kernel privilege are the most detrimental to system security and hard to mitigate. However, recently proposed software-only mitigations are not effective against such kernel privilege escalation attacks. In this paper, we propose an effective and practical software-only defense, called SoftTRR, to protect page tables from all existing rowhammer attacks on x86. The key idea of SoftTRR is to refresh the rows occupied by page tables when a suspicious rowhammer activity is detected. SoftTRR is motivated by DRAM-chip-based target row refresh (ChipTRR) but eliminates its main security limitation (i.e., ChipTRR tracks a limited number of rows and thus can be bypassed by many-sided hammer). Specifically, SoftTRR protects an unlimited number of page tables by tracking memory accesses to the rows that are in close proximity to page-table rows and refreshing the page-table rows once the tracked access count exceeds a pre-defined threshold. We implement a prototype of SoftTRR as a loadable kernel module, and evaluate its security effectiveness, performance overhead, and memory consumption. The experimental results show that SoftTRR protects page tables from real-world rowhammer attacks and incurs small performance overhead as well as memory cost.

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Zhi Zhang, Yueqiang Cheng, Minghua Wang, Wei He, Wenhao Wang, Nepal Surya, Yansong Gao, Kang Li, Zhe Wang, Chenggang Wu. 2021-12-12. SoftTRR: Protect Page Tables Against RowHammer Attacks using Software-only Target Row Refresh. https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.10269

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