Reverse-Engineering Bank Addressing Functions on AMD CPUs
Abstract
The memory controller of the CPU uses bank addressing functions to determine physical locations within DRAM DIMMs. There are many fields of application for these addressing functions, particularly in security. For exam- ple, many Rowhammer proofs-of-concept use bank addressing functions to select addresses located on the same bank but in different rows to produce row conflicts. AMD provides these addressing functions for older CPU models. Hence, research on reverse-engineering addressing functions mainly targeted Intel CPUs since Intel did not publish these functions. However, AMD stopped to publish the DRAM addressing functions several years ago. AMD manufactures roughly a third of the sold CPUs in today’s CPU market. We analyze reverse- engineering tools for addressing functions and find that they do not work with AMD CPUs, hindering reverse-engineering at- tempts and Rowhammer attacks on systems with AMD CPUs. In this paper, we introduce an approach to reverse-engineer the addressing functions of AMD CPUs, which facilitates future Rowhammer experiments on AMD CPUs.
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| Titel | Reverse-Engineering Bank Addressing Functions on AMD CPUs |
|---|---|
| Medien | The 3rd Workshop on DRAM Security (DRAMSec 2023), co-located with ISCA |
| Verlag | --- |
| Heft | --- |
| Band | 2023 |
| ISBN | --- |
| Verfasser/Herausgeber | Martin Heckel, Prof. Dr. Florian Adamsky |
| Seiten | --- |
| Veröffentlichungsdatum | 2023-05-23 |
| Projekttitel | NeRAM |
| Zitation | Heckel, Martin; Adamsky, Florian (2023): Reverse-Engineering Bank Addressing Functions on AMD CPUs. The 3rd Workshop on DRAM Security (DRAMSec 2023), co-located with ISCA 2023. |