Paper gives probabilistic semantics for Rowhammer-style bit flips
Original title: A Rowhammer attack on Fil-C's software capabilities
A collapse theorem says physical separation makes protected executions match the fault-free run for every finite prefix.
The paper presents probabilistic small-step semantics for an idealized imperative language under Rowhammer-style faults, abstracting away DRAM physics. A general fault model assigns bit-flip probabilities during reads or writes in a specified victim region. Physical separation is formalized as a case study, and a distribution-independent theorem equates the protected projection with the Dirac distribution of the Rowhammer-free execution for every finite prefix. The work also develops an observation-parametric account of secure information flow.
Unconfirmed: The title names an attack on Fil-C, but the abstract only presents formal semantics and a physical-separation proof.
- The semantics abstracts from DRAM internals and semiconductor physics.
- Faults are probabilities of bit flips during reads or writes in a victim region.
- The theorem covers prefixes of terminating and non-terminating executions.
- The title names Fil-C, but the abstract does not describe that attack.
From the original article
1 min read at arxiv.orgRowhammer is a hardware vulnerability in dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) in which repeated accesses to one or more aggressor rows can induce bit-flips in nearby victim rows. This phenomenon violates a core assumption of conventional programming language semantics: that reading from or writing to one memory location does not modify others.
By Amir Naseredini · arxiv.org
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