SOSP2023

Siloz: Leveraging DRAM Isolation Domains to Prevent Inter-VM Rowhammer

Kevin Loughlin, Jonah Rosenblum, Stefan Saroiu, Alec Wolman, Dimitrios Skarlatos, Baris Kasikci

13 citations

Abstract

Today's cloud DRAM lacks strong isolation primitives, highlighted by Rowhammer bit flips. Rowhammer poses an increasing threat to cloud security/reliability, given (1) DRAM activation rates in commodity and malicious workloads already exceed Rowhammer thresholds, and (2) thresholds are decreasing in newer DRAM. Deployed hardware mitigations remain vulnerable, turning cloud providers toward software defenses. However, existing defenses incur high performance or memory overhead or contain significant protection gaps.