text: In cloud computing environments, multiple tenants are often co-located on the same multi-processor system. Thus, preventing information leakage between tenants is crucial. While the hypervisor enforces software isolation, shared hardware, such as the CPU cache or memory bus, can leak sensitive information. For security reasons, shared memory between tenants is typically disabled. Furthermore, tenants often do not share a physical CPU. In this setting, cache attacks do not work and only a slow cross-CPU covert channel over the memory bus is known. In contrast, we demonstrate a high-speed covert channel as well as the first side-channel attack working across processors and without any shared memory. To build these attacks, we use the undocumented DRAM address mappings. We present two methods to reverse engineer the mapping of memory addresses to DRAM channels, ranks, and banks. One uses physical probing of the memory bus, the other runs entirely in software and is fully automated. Using this mapping, we introduce DRAMA attacks, a novel class of attacks that exploit the DRAM row buffer that is shared, even in multi-processor systems. Thus, our attacks work in the most restrictive environments. First, we build a covert channel with a capacity of up to 2 Mbps, which is three to four orders of magnitude faster than memory-bus-based channels. Second, we build a side-channel template attack that can automatically locate and monitor memory accesses. Third, we show how using the DRAM mappings improves existing attacks and in particular enables practical Rowhammer attacks on DDR4.
  @cite_13: We explore techniques to reverse-engineer properties of DRAM memory controllers (MCs). This includes page policies, address mapping schemes and command arbitration schemes. There are several benefits to knowing this information: they allow analysis techniques to effectively compute worst-case bounds, and they allow customizations to be made in software for predictability. We develop a latency-based analysis, and use this analysis to devise algorithms for micro-benchmarks to extract properties of MCs. In order to cover a breadth of page policies, address mappings and command arbitration schemes, we explore our technique using a micro-architecture simulation framework and document our findings.
  @cite_22: Row hammer attacks exploit electrical interactions between neighboring memory cells in high-density dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) to induce memory errors. By rapidly and repeatedly accessing DRAMs with specific patterns, an adversary with limited privilege on the target machine may trigger bit flips in memory regions that he has no permission to access directly. In this paper, we explore row hammer attacks in cross-VM settings, in which a malicious VM exploits bit flips induced by row hammer attacks to crack memory isolation enforced by virtualization. To do so with high fidelity, we develop novel techniques to determine the physical address mapping in DRAMmodules at runtime (to improve the effectiveness of double-sided row hammer attacks), methods to exhaustively hammer a large fraction of physical memory from a guest VM (to collect exploitable vulnerable bits), and innovative approaches to break Xen paravirtualized memory isolation (to access arbitrary physical memory of the shared machine). Our study also suggests that the demonstrated row hammer attacks are applicable in modern public clouds where Xen paravirtualization technology is adopted. This shows that the presented cross-VM row hammer attacks are of practical importance.
summary: Independently of our work, Hassan al @cite_13 also proposed algorithms to reverse engineer DRAM functions based on timing differences. However, their approach requires customized hardware performance-monitoring units. Thus, they tested their approach only in a simulated environment and not on real systems. Concurrently to our work, Xiao al @cite_22 proposed a method to reverse engineer DRAM functions based on the timing differences caused by row conflicts. Although their method is similar to ours, their focus is different, as they used the functions to then perform Rowhammer attacks across VMs.