ISCA Distinguished Artifact Award for RowPress

We’re excited to have won a Distinguished Artifact Award at ISCA 2023 for our work “RowPress: Amplifying Read Disturbance in Modern DRAM Chips”.

Congratulations to Haocong Luo and co-authors Ataberk Olgun, Abdullah Giray Yağlıkçı, Yahya Can Tuğrul, Steve Rhyner, M. Banu Cavlak, Joël Lindegger, Mohammad Sadrosadati, and Onur Mutlu on this well-deserved award!

This is the first year that the International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA) conducted artifact evaluation (AE) and gave Distinguished Artifact awards.  Only two published papers (out of 79 published and 372 submitted) were selected to receive awards. RowPress is one of them.

Haocong Luo recently completed his Master’s thesis in our group, and has just started a PhD with us.

RowPress Source Code and Datasets: https://github.com/CMU-SAFARI/RowPress
Officially artifact evaluated as available, reusable and reproducible.
Best artifact award at ISCA 2023.

About RowPress: 

Our work experimentally demonstrates and analyzes a widespread read-disturb phenomenon, RowPress, in real DDR4 DRAM chips. RowPress breaks memory isolation by keeping a DRAM row open for a long period of time, which disturbs physically nearby rows enough to cause bitflips.

Our experimental characterization of 164 real DRAM chips reveals that RowPress 1) has a different underlying mechanism from the well-studied RowHammer phenomenon, 2) greatly amplifies DRAM’s vulnerability to read disturbance by reducing the number of activations to induce a bitflip by one to two orders of magnitude (and in extreme cases to only a single activation), and 3) becomes worse as DRAM technology node size reduces.

We demonstrate that a user-level program causes RowPress bitflips in a real system, even in the presence of in-DRAM read-disturb mitigation mechanisms, much more so than the bitflips RowHammer can induce. We describe a methodology to adapt existing read-disturb mitigation mechanisms that only consider RowHammer to also mitigate RowPress, enabling strong protection against RowPress with low additional performance overhead.

We provide source code, scripts & datasets for experimental characterization and real-system demonstration of RowPress on GitHub: https://github.com/CMU-SAFARI/RowPress

Thank you to ISCA for acknowledging our work and potential impact for the ISCA community!

D-ITET News: SAFARI Research Group received the Distinguished Artifact Award at ISCA 2023

Paper citation & resources: