Assessing the Potential of Escalating RowHammer Attack Distance to Bypass-Counter-Based Defenses

This brief studies the impact of escalating DRAM RowHammer (RH) attack distance to potentially bypass well-developed counter-based defenses leveraging a multisided fault injection mechanism. By conducting systematic experimentation on 128 commercial DDR4 products, our results challenge recent research findings, showing that cells positioned at a greater physical distance from the target rows do not significantly affect performance across chips sourced from leading DRAM manufacturers. This implies such RH models are unable to reliably bypass the latest counter-based defense mechanisms. We conduct an extensive attack design space exploration and compare the performance efficiency between this mechanism and the well-known double-sided attack.