ZenHammer: Rowhammer Attacks on AMD Zen-based Platforms

Learn about the first successful Rowhammer attack on modern AMD CPUs in this 14-minute conference presentation from USENIX Security '24. Discover how researchers from ETH Zurich overcame three major challenges to execute attacks on AMD Zen architectures: reverse engineering complex DRAM addressing functions, synchronizing with refresh commands to bypass in-DRAM security measures, and achieving sufficient row activation throughput. Explore the technical implementation of ZenHammer, which successfully demonstrated bit flips on multiple DDR4 devices across AMD Zen 2 and Zen 3 platforms, and achieved the first-ever Rowhammer bit flips on a DDR5 device. Understand the implications of these findings for security on AMD's increasingly popular Zen-based platforms.