Flipping Bits Like a Pro: Precise Rowhammering on Embedded Devices

Abstract

In this article, we introduce Flip-On-Chip, the first end-to-end tool that thoroughly examines the vulnerability of embedded DRAM against rowhammer bit flips. Our tool, Flip-On-Chip, utilizes DRAM address mapping information to efficiently and deterministically perform a double-sided RowHammer test. We evaluated Flip-On-Chip on two DRAM modules: 1) LPDDR2 and 2) LPDDR4. It is found that our proposed tool increases the number of bit flips by 7.34 % on LPDDR2 and by 99.97 % on LPDDR4, as compared to state-of-the-art approaches provided in the literature. Additionally, Flip-On-Chip takes into account a number of system-level parameters to evaluate their influence on triggering Rowhammer bit flips.