Characterization of the Stability of DRAM Read Disturbances

Roberto Capoferri1, Alessandro Barenghi2, Luca Oddone Breveglieri1, Khalil Gammoh3, Niccolò Izzo3, Gerardo Pelosi1
1Politecnico di Milano, 2Politecnico di Milano - DEIB, 3Micron


Abstract

Read disturbance phenomena, such as the ones classified as RowHammer and RowPress, are well known causes for data corruption in DRAM memories, which were shown to be exploitable security vulnerabilities. Indeed, both approaches alter the memory locations nearby a row that is targeted by an attacker, potentially leading to writing data in memory locations that should not be accessible by her. In this work, we take a constructive point of view on the read disturbance phenomena, and, observing that the data alteration patterns depend on the single device instance, we characterize them with the intent of building a Physically Unclonable Function (PUF). To this end, we characterize the repeatability of data alteration and the information content of the bitflip patterns in modern DDR5 DRAM memories, which would also allow a PUF implementation fully contained in the DRAM module. Our experimental results on multiple DDR5 DRAM chips show that the bitflip patterns caused by read disturbances are remarkably stable when considering a single DRAM row, and are essentially independent across rows in the same bank, or across different devices. These results, combined with a significant information content coming from the unique bitflip pattern produced by a read disturbance, point to PUFs based on read disturbance as interesting candidates for future implementations.