Understanding and Mitigating Side and Covert Channel Vulnerabilities Introduced by RowHammer Defenses

DRAM chips are vulnerable to read disturbance phenomena (e.g., RowHammer and RowPress), where repeatedly accessing or keeping open a DRAM row causes bitflips in nearby rows. Attackers leverage RowHammer bitflips in real systems to take over systems and leak data. Consequently, many prior works propose mitigations, including recent DDR specifications introducing new mitigations (e.g., PRAC and RFM). For robust operation, it is critical to analyze other security implications of RowHammer mitigations. Unfortunately, no prior work analyzes the timing covert and side channel vulnerabilities introduced by RowHammer mitigations.This paper presents the first analysis and evaluation of timing covert and side channel vulnerabilities introduced by state-of-the-art RowHammer mitigations. We demonstrate that RowHammer mitigations' preventive actions have two fundamental features that enable timing channels. First, preventive actions reduce DRAM bandwidth availability, resulting in longer memory latencies. Second, preventive actions can be triggered on demand depending on memory access patterns.We introduce LeakyHammer, a new class of attacks that leverage the RowHammer mitigation-induced memory latency differences to establish communication channels and leak secrets. First, we build two covert channel attacks exploiting two state-of-the-art RowHammer mitigations, achieving 38.6 Kbps and 48.6 Kbps channel capacity. Second, we demonstrate a website fingerprinting attack that identifies visited websites based on the RowHammer-preventive actions they cause. We propose and evaluate two countermeasures against LeakyHammer and show that fundamentally mitigating LeakyHammer induces large overheads in highly RowHammer-vulnerable systems. We believe and hope our work can enable and aid future work on designing robust systems against RowHammer mitigation-based side and covert channels.

@article{bostancı2025_2503.17891,
  title={ Understanding and Mitigating Side and Covert Channel Vulnerabilities Introduced by RowHammer Defenses },
  author={ F. Nisa Bostancı and Oğuzhan Canpolat and Ataberk Olgun and İsmail Emir Yüksel and Konstantinos Kanellopoulos and Mohammad Sadrosadati and A. Giray Yağlıkçı and Onur Mutlu },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.17891},
  year={ 2025 }
}