[thijsr]

RowHammer is not a thing of the past. In fact, modern DRAM chips are significantly more susceptible to RowHammer due to their increased chip density [1].

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.13121

[omoikane]

In the "countermeasures" section of the linked paper[1], it mentioned that there are some new techniques available, but repeatedly mentioned that they are not yet available in consumer systems. Maybe rowhammer will eventually be a thing of the past despite the increasing chip density.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.02545

[HankB99]

Thanks for the link. I guess I thought wrong. But I have more questions.

> with RowHammer protection mechanisms disabled

I wonder what this means. Is it S/W mitigations or does it include H/W factors like disabling on-die ECC.

It makes sense to me that with all other things being equal that higher density would lead to more susceptibility to Rowhammer. But as always, other things are not equal. I expect that on-die ECC would reduce susceptibility to Rowhammer and AFAIK that is used for DDR4 and DDR5 RAM, but perhaps not exclusively. Or did disabling "protection mechanisms" include disabling that (if it is even possible.)

[sweetjuly]

The mitigations are usually about limiting the number of times you can access without refreshing. ECC helps in detecting and correcting (obviously) but it doesn't solve the underlying issue that accessing a cell over and over can cause bit flips in neighbors. ECC can be defeated if uncorrectable errors are not fatal or if the attacker can just crash the system over and over. Being able to introduce memory errors is a fundamental and unmitigatable issue that must be resolved by making these errors impossible. This isn't a problem software can solve.