PVAC: A RowHammer Mitigation Architecture Exploiting Per-victim-row Counting

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2604.20576v1
• Date: Wed, 22 Apr 2026 13:56:38 GMT
• Title: PVAC: A RowHammer Mitigation Architecture Exploiting Per-victim-row Counting
• Abstract summary: DDR5 introduces per-row activation counting (PRAC) to track aggressor activity.<n>PRAC tracks the aggressor but aims to protect the victim.<n>We present Per-Victim-row hAmmered Counting (PVAC), a victim-based counting mechanism.
• Score: 8.49744530728153
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: As DRAM scaling exacerbates RowHammer, DDR5 introduces per-row activation counting (PRAC) to track aggressor activity. However, PRAC indiscriminately increments counters on every activation -- including benign refreshes -- while relying solely on explicit RFM operations for resets. Consequently, counters saturate even in an idle bank, triggering cascading mitigations and degrading performance. This vulnerability arises from a fundamental mismatch: PRAC tracks the aggressor but aims to protect the victim. We present Per-Victim-row hAmmered Counting (PVAC), a victim-based counting mechanism that aligns the counter semantics with the physical disturbance mechanism of RowHammer. PVAC increments the counters of victim rows, resets the activated row, and naturally bounds counter values under normal refresh. To enable efficient victim-based updates, PVAC employs a dedicated counter subarray (CSA) that performs all counter resets and increments concurrently with normal accesses, without timing overhead. We further devise an energy-efficient CSA layout that minimizes refresh-induced counter accesses. Through victim-based counting, PVAC supports higher hammering tolerance than PRAC while maintaining the same worst-case safety guarantee. Across benign workloads and adversarial attack patterns, PVAC avoids spurious Alerts, eliminates PRAC timing penalties, and achieves higher performance and lower energy consumption than prior PRAC-based defenses.

Related papers

• Just Noticeable Difference Modeling for Token Compression in Vision-Language-Action Models [62.522141464687195]
  We introduce Action-JND, which extends the principle of just noticeable difference (JND) to embodied perception.<n>A token change is considered tolerable only when the induced action deviation remains within a tolerated margin.<n>The resulting action-tolerance score serves as a plug-and-play criterion for VLA compression paradigms.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-08-21T15:59:37Z)
• What Does the Server See? Understanding Privacy Leakage from Large Language Models in Split Inference [13.194874392306085]
  We introduce ActInv, which solves an intermediate activation matching problem to reconstruct the client's input.<n>To understand this vulnerability, we develop Perturbation Amplification Factor (PAF), a metric for quantifying a layer's inherent resistance to reconstruction.<n>Our analysis reveals that privacy vulnerability is not uniform across layers, with some layers being highly susceptible to leakage while others offer natural resistance.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-05-22T02:14:16Z)
• RowHammer Vulnerability Counter (RVC): Redefining RowHammer Detection with Victim-Centric Tracking [0.0]
  The Rowhammer vulnerability poses an increasing challenge with newer generations of DRAM and aggressive technology scaling.<n>Existing mitigation techniques, such as Graphene, Twice, and Hydra, primarily rely on tracking activation counts for each row.<n>We propose a novel framework called Rowhammer Vulnerability Count (RVC), which shifts the focus from activation count tracking to evaluating a row's actual vulnerability to bit flips selectively.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-04-27T10:21:51Z)
• CORA: Conformal Risk-Controlled Agents for Safeguarded Mobile GUI Automation [68.53387633351484]
  We propose CORA (COnformal Risk-controlled GUI Agent), a post-policy, pre-action safeguarding framework that provides statistical guarantees on harmful executed actions.<n> CORA reformulates safety as selective action execution: we train a Guardian model to estimate action-conditional risk for each proposed step.<n>To rigorously evaluate this paradigm, we introduce Phone-Harm, a new benchmark of mobile safety violations with step-level harm labels.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-04-10T09:41:21Z)
• Improving Black-Box Generative Attacks via Generator Semantic Consistency [51.470649503929344]
  generative attacks produce adversarial examples in a single forward pass at test time.<n>We enforce semantic consistency by aligning the early generator's intermediate features to an EMA teacher.<n>Our approach can be seamlessly integrated into existing generative attacks with consistent improvements in black-box transfer.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-06-23T02:35:09Z)
• CnC-PRAC: Coalesce, not Cache, Per Row Activation Counts for an Efficient in-DRAM Rowhammer Mitigation [4.040475373859059]
  JEDEC has introduced the Per Row Activation Counting (PRAC) framework for DDR5 and future DRAMs.<n>We propose CnC-PRAC, a PRAC implementation that addresses both performance and energy overheads.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-06-13T17:28:38Z)
• QPRAC: Towards Secure and Practical PRAC-based Rowhammer Mitigation using Priority Queues [4.3423142741332255]
  JEDEC has introduced the Per Row Activation Counting (PRAC) framework for DDR5 and future DRAMs.<n> PRAC enables a holistic mitigation of Rowhammer attacks even at ultra-low Rowhammer thresholds.<n>This paper provides the first secure, scalable, and practical RowHammer solution using the PRAC framework.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-01-31T02:48:20Z)
• ReToMe-VA: Recursive Token Merging for Video Diffusion-based Unrestricted Adversarial Attack [71.2286719703198]
  We propose the Recursive Token Merging for Video Diffusion-based Unrestricted Adrial Attack (ReToMe-VA) To achieve spatial imperceptibility, ReToMe-VA adopts a Timestep-wise Adrial Latent Optimization (TALO) strategy. To achieve temporal imperceptibility, ReToMe-VA introduces a Recursive Token Merging (ReToMe) mechanism by matching and merging tokens across video frames.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-08-10T08:10:30Z)
• Advancing Generalized Transfer Attack with Initialization Derived Bilevel Optimization and Dynamic Sequence Truncation [49.480978190805125]
  Transfer attacks generate significant interest for black-box applications. Existing works essentially directly optimize the single-level objective w.r.t. surrogate model. We propose a bilevel optimization paradigm, which explicitly reforms the nested relationship between the Upper-Level (UL) pseudo-victim attacker and the Lower-Level (LL) surrogate attacker.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-06-04T07:45:27Z)
• DSAC: Low-Cost RowHammer Mitigation Using In-DRAM Stochastic and Approximate Counting Algorithm [3.8274879841876546]
  This paper provides the fundamental mechanisms of two types of row activation-induced bit flips.<n>It proposes in-DRAM protection techniques, which can achieve 133x lower Maximum Disturbance than the state-of-the-art counter-based algorithm.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-02-07T16:58:58Z)
• IBP Regularization for Verified Adversarial Robustness via Branch-and-Bound [85.6899802468343]
  We present IBP-R, a novel verified training algorithm that is both simple effective. We also present UPB, a novel robustness based on $beta$-CROWN, that reduces the cost state-of-the-art branching algorithms.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2022-06-29T17:13:25Z)

This list is automatically generated from the titles and abstracts of the papers in this site.

This site does not guarantee the quality of this site (including all information) and is not responsible for any consequences.