Ten Years of Rowhammer: A Retrospect and Path to the Future

Explore a 42-minute conference talk from the 38th Chaos Communication Congress (38C3) examining the decade-long evolution of the Rowhammer security vulnerability in modern DRAM memory systems. Dive into the fundamental mechanics of how increasing memory cell density leads to exploitable disturbance errors, allowing attackers to manipulate inaccessible memory through targeted access patterns. Track the security cat-and-mouse game that has unfolded since 2014, from initial proof-of-concept exploits achieving privilege escalation through Chrome's NaCl sandbox to more recent attacks on DDR4/DDR5 memory and remote network-based techniques. Learn about various attempted mitigations like ECC and TRR, how they've been bypassed, and related effects like Rowpress. Participate in groundbreaking research by using a new open-source framework to test your own system's Rowhammer vulnerability, contributing to the first large-scale study of real-world prevalence of this persistent security challenge.