The discovery of the longest pattern ever for DDR5 Rowhammer flips!
- Speaker: Kaveh Razavi
- Date: April 1st, 2026 - 11:00 am
- Location: CCGEG002, Sandgasse 38a
The first Rowhammer exploit was published a little more than a decade ago on a DDR3-based system. Since then, we have had two generations of DRAM technology with proprietary mitigations. In this talk, I present our journey in understanding the security guarantees of these mitigations in DDR4 and DDR5 devices through significant platform building efforts, painstaking reverse engineering, and creative system-level techniques. The results are not encouraging; DRAM is as insecure as a decade ago while the cost of independent security analysis is growing beyond what academia can do. I finish with a brief discussion of possible paths forward.
About the speaker: Kaveh is an associate professor at ETH Zurich where he leads the COMSEC group. Next to defensive work, he has been involved in the discovery of many high-profile security vulnerabilities in commodity DRAM and CPU chips. He is a proud owner of five Pwnies and many best/distinguished paper awards, including at Oakland, USENIX Security and MICRO.
