DNN-Defender: A Victim-Focused In-DRAM Defense Mechanism for Taming Adversarial Weight Attack on DNNs

Abstract: With deep learning deployed in many security-sensitive areas, machine learning security is becoming progressively important. Recent studies demonstrate attackers can exploit system-level techniques exploiting the RowHammer vulnerability of DRAM to deterministically and precisely flip bits in Deep Neural Networks (DNN) model weights to affect inference accuracy. The existing defense mechanisms are software-based, such as weight reconstruction requiring expensive training overhead or performance degradation. On the other hand, generic hardware-based victim-/aggressor-focused mechanisms impose expensive hardware overheads and preserve the spatial connection between victim and aggressor rows. In this paper, we present the first DRAM-based victim-focused defense mechanism tailored for quantized DNNs, named DNN-Defender that leverages the potential of in-DRAM swapping to withstand the targeted bit-flip attacks with a priority protection mechanism. Our results indicate that DNN-Defender can deliver a high level of protection downgrading the performance of targeted RowHammer attacks to a random attack level. In addition, the proposed defense has no accuracy drop on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet datasets without requiring any software training or incurring hardware overhead.