[zsmi]

There was a good paper on it in 2014. [1] They describe the RowHammer attack as: opening and closing (activation and precharge) a DRAM row (aggressor row) at a high enough rate (hammering) such that it can cause bit-flips in physically nearby rows (victim row).

Colloquially, it's basically a change in voltage in one place can indirectly cause a change in voltage in another place via capacitive coupling. Capacitance increases proportional to the inverse of the separating distance so only in recent years have things shrunk to the size that makes it an issue.

Since having less bits in DRAM is basically not an option most mitigation techniques that I know of remove the possibility of hammering: possibilities include the OS, memory system controller, or DRAM controller changes.

[1] https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~yoonguk/papers/kim-isca14.pdf

[woodruffw]

Much appreciated, thank you.