Revisiting Rowhammer Attacks in Embedded Systems

As the cell density of DRAM modules keeps increasing to guarantee the growing demand for memory capacity in modern computer and embedded system, the electromagnetic interference between memory cells increase significantly, leading to security vulnerabilities that can be exploited. In particular, the widespread Rowhammer vulnerability has been proven to exist in the most common DRAM modules manufactured after 2012. In this paper we are revisiting the exploitation approaches using the Rowhammer bug and we are providing an overall study of their security implications on Embedded Systems such as mobiles or tablets based on ARM architecture. Furthermore, we present our implementation approach on the Phys Feng Shui methodological attack for Android on a LG Nexus 5 device and we highlight the practical issues that arise when trying to trigger the Rowhammer attack on a real system.