Towards Remote Attestation of Microarchitectural Attacks: The Case of Rowhammer
This addresses the issue of hardware trustworthiness for systems vulnerable to microarchitectural attacks, offering a complementary detection method to existing prevention mechanisms, though it is incremental as it builds on prior attestation techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of microarchitectural vulnerabilities, specifically Rowhammer attacks, by proposing a detection-oriented approach through remote attestation, resulting in HammerWatch, which reliably distinguishes malicious behavior from benign operation in evaluations on 20000 simulated patterns.
Microarchitectural vulnerabilities increasingly undermine the assumption that hardware can be treated as a reliable root of trust. Prevention mechanisms often lag behind evolving attack techniques, leaving deployed systems unable to assume continued trustworthiness. We propose a shift from prevention to detection through microarchitectural-aware remote attestation. As a first instantiation of this idea, we present HammerWatch, a Rowhammer-aware remote attestation protocol that enables an external verifier to assess whether a system exhibits hardware-induced disturbance behavior. HammerWatch leverages memory-level evidence available on commodity platforms, specifically Machine-Check Exceptions (MCEs) from ECC DRAM and counter-based indicators from Per-Row Activation Counting (PRAC), and protects these measurements against kernel-level adversaries using TPM-anchored hash chains. We implement HammerWatch on commodity hardware and evaluate it on 20000 simulated benign and malicious access patterns. Our results show that the verifier reliably distinguishes Rowhammer-like behavior from benign operation under conservative heuristics, demonstrating that detection-oriented attestation is feasible and can complement incomplete prevention mechanisms