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CVE PROGRAM SOURCE RECORD9.0 Critical

CVE-2021-42114

Scalable Rowhammering In the Frequency Domain to Bypass TRR Mitigations On Modern DDR4/LPDDR4X Devices

Description

Modern DRAM devices (PC-DDR4, LPDDR4X) are affected by a vulnerability in their internal Target Row Refresh (TRR) mitigation against Rowhammer attacks. Novel non-uniform Rowhammer access patterns, consisting of aggressors with different frequencies, phases, and amplitudes allow triggering bit flips on affected memory modules using our Blacksmith fuzzer. The patterns generated by Blacksmith were able to trigger bitflips on all 40 PC-DDR4 DRAM devices in our test pool, which cover the three major DRAM manufacturers: Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron. This means that, even when chips advertised as Rowhammer-free are used, attackers may still be able to exploit Rowhammer. For example, this enables privilege-escalation attacks against the kernel or binaries such as the sudo binary, and also triggering bit flips in RSA-2048 keys (e.g., SSH keys) to gain cross-tenant virtual-machine access. We can confirm that DRAM devices acquired in July 2020 with DRAM chips from all three major DRAM vendors (Samsung, SK Hynix, Micron) are affected by this vulnerability. For more details, please refer to our publication.

Affected products

Version statuses are supplied by the assigning organization. Consult the original record for detailed ranges and platform conditions.

Micron Micron ddr4_sdram

  • 1affected

Samsung Samsung ddr4_sdram

  • 1affected

SK Hynix SK Hynix ddr4_sdram

  • 1affected

Micron Micron lpddr4

  • 1affected

Samsung Samsung lpddr4

  • 1affected

SK Hynix SK Hynix lpddr4

  • 1affected

References