RowArmor: Efficient and Comprehensive Protection Against DRAM Disturbance Attacks

Shrinking process technologies have made DRAM increasingly vulnerable to disturbance attacks, such as RowHammer, which can compromise data integrity or induce a Denial-of-Service (DoS) state. Existing solutions focus on preventing errors through activation monitoring and extra refreshes, but they often incur substantial performance overhead and can unintentionally exacerbate DoS risks. This paper introduces RowArmor, a novel defense mechanism that addresses both data corruption and DoS attacks. RowArmor adopts a reactive approach, correcting disturbance errors as they occur via address scrambling and enhanced error correcting codes. This strategy avoids the high costs of preventive methods while addressing diverse attack patterns, including RowPress. Our evaluation demonstrates that RowArmor effectively defends against data corruption and DoS attacks with a negligible performance overhead of up to 0.7%.