Vulnerabilities
Rowhammer
Also known as: Row hammer attack
Definition
A hardware vulnerability in DRAM where repeatedly activating one memory row causes bit flips in physically adjacent rows, undermining memory integrity.
Examples
- Project Zero's 2015 exploit flipping bits in PTEs to gain kernel privileges.
- Drammer (2016) — Rowhammer-based root exploit on Android.
Related terms
Side-Channel Attack
An attack that recovers secrets from a system by observing physical or implementation characteristics — timing, power, electromagnetic emissions, caches, acoustic signals — rather than logical flaws.
Fault Injection
A class of physical or logical attacks that deliberately induce abnormal conditions in hardware or software to bypass security checks or leak secrets.
Memory Corruption
An umbrella term for vulnerabilities where a program writes outside the bounds of intended memory, undermining type-safety, control flow, or data integrity.
Spectre
A family of microarchitectural attacks that abuse CPU speculative execution to leak data across security boundaries via cache-based side channels.
Meltdown
A microarchitectural vulnerability (CVE-2017-5754) that lets unprivileged code read kernel memory by exploiting out-of-order execution and a delayed permission check.
Vulnerability
A weakness in a system, application, or process that an attacker can exploit to violate confidentiality, integrity, or availability.