Jenga impact and WCET analysis on complex real-time architectures

Evaluate the impact of the Jenga attack and extend the PRAC-aware WCET analysis to real-time platforms incorporating operating systems, cache hierarchies, and multi-core processor and memory architectures, including the effects of contention, cache hits, pipeline overlap, and out-of-order execution.

Background

The study isolates the effects of counter-based RowHammer mitigations using a single-core, cacheless, bare-metal system. Modern real-time platforms, however, often include operating systems, caches, and multiple cores, all of which can alter both the attacker’s ability to construct a Jenga tower and the victim’s observable delay.

The paper identifies unresolved modeling challenges: cache hits may hide part of the refresh-induced latency, while pipeline overlap and out-of-order execution may reduce the visible effect of DRAM stalls. Extending the analysis to these architectures is intended to produce tighter and less pessimistic WCET bounds.

References

Although we expect the Jenga attack to remain applicable on more complex systems, evaluating its impact under these architectures is an important direction for future work. Our current WCET analysis focuses on a simple architecture and does not account for the effects introduced by more complex processor and memory hierarchies. For instance, cache hits may mask part of the RFM-induced latency overhead, while pipeline overlap and out-of-order execution may reduce the observable impact of DRAM stalls. Extending the analysis to account for these mechanisms would enable tighter and less pessimistic WCET bounds.

— JENGA: Exploiting Counter-Based RowHammer Countermeasures to Break Real-Time Predictability  (2609.01077 - Abgrall et al., 1 Sep 2026) in Section “Complex Architectures: Multi-Core Systems and Memory Hierarchies”

In this class of systems, however, the problem of inter-core temporal interference due to the extensive sharing of hardware resources in the memory hierarchy remains an open challenge.

— Revisiting MemGuard Overhead: A Reproduction Report  (2609.04547 - Chen et al., 3 Sep 2026) in Section 1, Introduction