Researchers at ETH Zurich have introduced Phoenix, a novel Rowhammer attack targeting DDR5 memory that can manipulate data, steal encryption keys, and escalate privileges by exploiting weaknesses in the memory's TRR mechanism. This attack highlights ongoing vulnerabilities in memory security despite manufacturer defenses and emphasizes the need for improved countermeasures. The study also underscores that Rowhammer attacks remain a significant threat across different generations of memory modules.
Researchers have successfully demonstrated a Rowhammer attack against the GDDR6 memory of an NVIDIA A6000 GPU, revealing that a single bit flip could drastically reduce the accuracy of deep neural network models from 80% to 0.1%. Nvidia has acknowledged the findings and suggested enabling error-correcting code (ECC) as a mitigation strategy, although it may impact performance and memory capacity. The researchers have also created a dedicated website for their proof-of-concept code and shared their detailed findings in a published paper.