Security News > 2024 > March > New ZenHammer memory attack impacts AMD Zen CPUs

Academic researchers developed ZenHammer, the first variant of the Rowhammer DRAM attack that works on CPUs based on recent AMD Zen microarchitecture that map physical addresses on DDR4 and DDR5 memory chips.

The ZenHammer attack was developed by researchers at public research university ETH Zurich, who shared their technical paper with BleepingComputer.

Rowhammer is a well-documented attack method that exploits a physical characteristic of modern Dynamic Random-Access Memory to alter data by repeatedly accessing specific rows of memory cells through read/write operations to change bit values inside.

The researchers demonstrated that the ZenHammer attack could induce bit flips with DDR4 devices on AMD Zen 2 and Zen 3 platforms.

The researchers were also successful with DDR5 chips on AMD's Zen 4 microarchitectural platform, previously considered better shielded against Rowhammer attacks.

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News URL

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/new-zenhammer-memory-attack-impacts-amd-zen-cpus/