Cool. So. I'm the second talk of the day.
And my talk is gonna be about
a paper with a pretty long title.
It's called Row Hammer
Flipping Bits in Memory
Without Accessing Them
colon, even more stuff.
And experimenting something
but that doesn't really matter.
So, my name is Vishnu
And I'm a year 4 Computer Science student
just like Chin.
and we are actually part of NUS Hackers.
It is a club/society in NUS.
This is my second time here.
I was here exactly 12 Papers We Love ago.
One year ago.
Audience: aww "Anniversary!"
... presenting the Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange
Which is also a security related paper
And today is another security related paper
Even though I have no academic experience
in security at all,
just seems to click with my interests.
So, the paper,
It's called... ah, colon... An Experimental Study of DRAM Disturbance Errors
This is a joint publication
by CMU and Intel Labs
The reason why it fascinated me so much is
We always talk about software exploits
as something to do with software.
It's a bug in software.
Either programmer made a mistake.
Or is usually a programmer made
a mistake somewhere
Or you forgot to check something.
But this is a hardware bug.
That affects software.
And that fascinated me.
A mistake in hardware,
or so-called mistake in hardware,
which you can not fix.
Because you can't patch hardware.
Is now affecting software forever.
And it's almost unpatchable.
Just because of the way hardware is.
Once you release hardware.
That's it.
So before we talk about
what this paper is about
let me just give you a brief history lesson
on what DRAM is.
DRAM stands for
Dynamic RAM
And that's the kind of RAM
that we have in all of our machines
Chinmay: Sorry, memory lane...
Thank you.
Yep, a lot of jokes like that
sprinkled inside this talk.
So DRAM stands for Dynamic RAM.
And it's the kind of RAM
that we have in every single machine
that we touch these days.
Previously in the 90s there was
a thing called SRAM
but it wasn't performing enough
so they made this thing called DRAM
for Dynamic RAM.
Here's an example of a kind of DRAM module
This is the Micron something
and this is a 1 MB chip.
So this entire chip holds exactly
1 megabyte of information
Which means that... one million...
Sorry...?
Rahul: RAM chips are normally sold
Rahul: in terms of bits.
Rahul: So when you say 1024
Rahul: that's 1024 megabit, usually.
Sorry, megabit. Which makes it 128 KB.
Sorry, you are right. it's actually 128 KB.
And, yea, so there's actually like
1 million dots in here.
If you count.
So each single dot here
Is called DRAM cell
And to understand the flaw here
We actually need to learn
exactly how a DRAM cell works.