Threshold Breaker: Can Counter-Based RowHammer Prevention Mechanisms Truly Safeguard DRAM?

Abstract: This paper challenges the existing victim-focused counter-based RowHammer detection mechanisms by experimentally demonstrating a novel multi-sided fault injection attack technique called Threshold Breaker. This mechanism can effectively bypass the most advanced counter-based defense mechanisms by soft-attacking the rows at a farther physical distance from the target rows. While no prior work has demonstrated the effect of such an attack, our work closes this gap by systematically testing 128 real commercial DDR4 DRAM products and reveals that the Threshold Breaker affects various chips from major DRAM manufacturers. As a case study, we compare the performance efficiency between our mechanism and a well-known double-sided attack by performing adversarial weight attacks on a modern Deep Neural Network (DNN). The results demonstrate that the Threshold Breaker can deliberately deplete the intelligence of the targeted DNN system while DRAM is fully protected.