(Moin Qureshi, Professor of Computer Science at GA Tech, presenting on Wed. 10/26 at 1:00 & 7:00 PM ET.)
Rowhammer allows an attacker to induce bit flips in a row
by rapidly accessing neighboring rows. Rowhammer is not just a reliability
concern but a severe security threat as it can be used to escalate privilege or
break confidentiality. The problem of Rowhammer continues to become worse for
two reasons: (1) The threshold of activations needed to induce Rowhammer
reduces with each generation, coming down by 30x in the last 7 years (2)
Attackers continue to come up with complex patterns that can break all
hardware-based defenses, including the ones commercially employed in current
chips. Currently, there is no guaranteed solution for Rowhammer. Hardware-based
mitigation of Rowhammer typically consists of two parts: a tracker to identify aggressor
rows and a mitigating action. At low thresholds tracking incurs significant
SRAM overheads (several megabytes). Furthermore, the common mitigating action
of refreshing neighboring victim rows is susceptible to the Half-Double attack
from Google. In this talk, I will discuss our recent solutions that enable
low-cost tracking of aggressor rows even at ultra-low thresholds (ISCA’22), a
new mitigating action of performing dynamic row migration that is resilient to
complex attacks patterns (ASPLOS’22 and MICRO’22), and a Rowhammer-aware ECC
design that provides in-built memory integrity-protection while incurring
virtually zero performance and storage overheads (HPCA’22).
Brief Bio: Moinuddin Qureshi is a Professor of
Computer Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His research interests
include computer architecture, hardware security, and quantum computing.
Qureshi received his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin in 2007. He
was a research scientist at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center (2007-2011),
where he developed the caching algorithms for Power 7 Systems. Qureshi received
the 2022 ACM SIGARCH Maurice Wilkes Award for contributions to
high-performance memory systems. He is a member of Hall-of-Fame of the trifecta
of architecture conferences: ISCA, MICRO, and HPCA. His research has been
recognized with multiple best-paper awards and multiple IEEE Top-Picks awards.
His papers were also awarded the 2019 NVMW Persistent Impact Prize and 2021
NVMW Persistent Impact Prize, in recognition of “exceptional impact on the
fields of study related to non-volatile memories”. Qureshi received the 2020
“Outstanding Researcher Award” from Intel and an “Outstanding Technical
Achievement” award from IBM Research. More information at https://www.cc.gatech.edu/~moin/
