ABACuS: All-Bank Activation Counters for Scalable and Low Overhead RowHammer Mitigation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Olgun, Ataberk, Tugrul, Yahya Can, Bostanci, Nisa, Yuksel, Ismail Emir, Luo, Haocong, Rhyner, Steve, Yaglikci, Abdullah Giray, Oliveira, Geraldo F., Mutlu, Onur
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author Olgun, Ataberk
Tugrul, Yahya Can
Bostanci, Nisa
Yuksel, Ismail Emir
Luo, Haocong
Rhyner, Steve
Yaglikci, Abdullah Giray
Oliveira, Geraldo F.
Mutlu, Onur
author_facet Olgun, Ataberk
Tugrul, Yahya Can
Bostanci, Nisa
Yuksel, Ismail Emir
Luo, Haocong
Rhyner, Steve
Yaglikci, Abdullah Giray
Oliveira, Geraldo F.
Mutlu, Onur
contents We introduce ABACuS, a new low-cost hardware-counter-based RowHammer mitigation technique that performance-, energy-, and area-efficiently scales with worsening RowHammer vulnerability. We observe that both benign workloads and RowHammer attacks tend to access DRAM rows with the same row address in multiple DRAM banks at around the same time. Based on this observation, ABACuS's key idea is to use a single shared row activation counter to track activations to the rows with the same row address in all DRAM banks. Unlike state-of-the-art RowHammer mitigation mechanisms that implement a separate row activation counter for each DRAM bank, ABACuS implements fewer counters (e.g., only one) to track an equal number of aggressor rows. Our evaluations show that ABACuS securely prevents RowHammer bitflips at low performance/energy overhead and low area cost. We compare ABACuS to four state-of-the-art mitigation mechanisms. At a near-future RowHammer threshold of 1000, ABACuS incurs only 0.58% (0.77%) performance and 1.66% (2.12%) DRAM energy overheads, averaged across 62 single-core (8-core) workloads, requiring only 9.47 KiB of storage per DRAM rank. At the RowHammer threshold of 1000, the best prior low-area-cost mitigation mechanism incurs 1.80% higher average performance overhead than ABACuS, while ABACuS requires 2.50X smaller chip area to implement. At a future RowHammer threshold of 125, ABACuS performs very similarly to (within 0.38% of the performance of) the best prior performance- and energy-efficient RowHammer mitigation mechanism while requiring 22.72X smaller chip area. ABACuS is freely and openly available at https://github.com/CMU-SAFARI/ABACuS.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2310_09977
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ABACuS: All-Bank Activation Counters for Scalable and Low Overhead RowHammer Mitigation
Olgun, Ataberk
Tugrul, Yahya Can
Bostanci, Nisa
Yuksel, Ismail Emir
Luo, Haocong
Rhyner, Steve
Yaglikci, Abdullah Giray
Oliveira, Geraldo F.
Mutlu, Onur
Cryptography and Security
Hardware Architecture
We introduce ABACuS, a new low-cost hardware-counter-based RowHammer mitigation technique that performance-, energy-, and area-efficiently scales with worsening RowHammer vulnerability. We observe that both benign workloads and RowHammer attacks tend to access DRAM rows with the same row address in multiple DRAM banks at around the same time. Based on this observation, ABACuS's key idea is to use a single shared row activation counter to track activations to the rows with the same row address in all DRAM banks. Unlike state-of-the-art RowHammer mitigation mechanisms that implement a separate row activation counter for each DRAM bank, ABACuS implements fewer counters (e.g., only one) to track an equal number of aggressor rows. Our evaluations show that ABACuS securely prevents RowHammer bitflips at low performance/energy overhead and low area cost. We compare ABACuS to four state-of-the-art mitigation mechanisms. At a near-future RowHammer threshold of 1000, ABACuS incurs only 0.58% (0.77%) performance and 1.66% (2.12%) DRAM energy overheads, averaged across 62 single-core (8-core) workloads, requiring only 9.47 KiB of storage per DRAM rank. At the RowHammer threshold of 1000, the best prior low-area-cost mitigation mechanism incurs 1.80% higher average performance overhead than ABACuS, while ABACuS requires 2.50X smaller chip area to implement. At a future RowHammer threshold of 125, ABACuS performs very similarly to (within 0.38% of the performance of) the best prior performance- and energy-efficient RowHammer mitigation mechanism while requiring 22.72X smaller chip area. ABACuS is freely and openly available at https://github.com/CMU-SAFARI/ABACuS.
title ABACuS: All-Bank Activation Counters for Scalable and Low Overhead RowHammer Mitigation
topic Cryptography and Security
Hardware Architecture
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.09977