Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Lucian Cojocar

Alastair Wolman

Stefan Saroiu

Kevin Robert Loughlin

Aspects of the present disclosure relate to techniques for minimizing the effects of RowHammer and induced charge leakage. In examples, systems and methods for preventing access pattern attacks in random-access memory (RAM) are provided. In aspects, a data request associated with a page table may be determined to be a potential security risk and such potential security risk may be mitigated by randomly selecting a memory region from a subset of memory regions, copying data stored in a memory region associated with a page table entry in the page table to the second memory region, disassociating the second memory region from the subset of memory regions and associating the memory region associated with the page table to the second memory region, and updating the page table entry in the page table to refer to the second memory region.

Prevention of RAM access pattern attacks via selective data movement

Aspects of the present disclosure relate to techniques for identifying susceptibility to induced charge leakage. In examples, a susceptibility test sequence comprising a cache line flush instruction is used to repeatedly activate a row of a memory unit. The susceptibility test sequence causes induced charge leakage within rows that are physically adjacent to the activated row, such that a physical adjacency map can be generated. In other examples, a physical adjacency map is used to identify a set of adjacent rows to a target row. A susceptibility test sequence is used to repeatedly activate the set of adjacent rows, after which the content of the target row is analyzed to determine whether the any bits of the target row flipped as a result of induced charge leakage. If flipped bits are not identified, an indication is generated that the memory unit is not susceptible to induced charge leakage.

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Amsterdam, Netherlands

Lucian Cojocar