Towards Remote Attestation of Microarchitectural Attacks: The Case of Rowhammer

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2603.24172v2
• Date: Thu, 26 Mar 2026 09:10:06 GMT
• Title: Towards Remote Attestation of Microarchitectural Attacks: The Case of Rowhammer
• Abstract summary: HammerWatch is a Rowhammer-aware remote attestation protocol that enables an external verifier to assess whether a system exhibits hardware-induced disturbance behavior.<n>We implement HammerWatch on commodity hardware and evaluate it on 20000 simulated benign and malicious access patterns.<n>Our results show that the verifier reliably distinguishes Rowhammer-like behavior from benign operation under conservative Activations.
• Score: 15.327433995073237
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: 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

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