CVEvulnerability

CVE-2021-42114

8.3 HIGH Published 2021-11-16 Modified 2026-06-17 Official page ↗
Status
Modified
Published
2021-11-16
Last modified
2026-06-17
Assigner
[email protected]
CVSS 3.1 ([email protected])
9.0 CRITICAL — CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:H
CVSS 3.1 ([email protected])
8.3 HIGH — CVSS:3.1/AV:A/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:H
CVSS 2.0 ([email protected])
7.9 HIGH — AV:A/AC:M/Au:N/C:C/I:C/A:C
Weaknesses
CWE-20

Description

Modern DRAM devices (PC-DDR4, LPDDR4X) are affected by a vulnerability in their internal Target Row Refresh (TRR) mitigation against Rowhammer attacks. Novel non-uniform Rowhammer access patterns, consisting of aggressors with different frequencies, phases, and amplitudes allow triggering bit flips on affected memory modules using our Blacksmith fuzzer. The patterns generated by Blacksmith were able to trigger bitflips on all 40 PC-DDR4 DRAM devices in our test pool, which cover the three major DRAM manufacturers: Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron. This means that, even when chips advertised as Rowhammer-free are used, attackers may still be able to exploit Rowhammer. For example, this enables privilege-escalation attacks against the kernel or binaries such as the sudo binary, and also triggering bit flips in RSA-2048 keys (e.g., SSH keys) to gain cross-tenant virtual-machine access. We can confirm that DRAM devices acquired in July 2020 with DRAM chips from all three major DRAM vendors (Samsung, SK Hynix, Micron) are affected by this vulnerability. For more details, please refer to our publication.

Affected configurations

• samsung ddr4 sdram firmware • samsung lddr4 firmware • micron lddr4 firmware • micron ddr4 sdram firmware • skhynix ddr4 sdram firmware • skhynix lddr4 firmware

Related

Weakness · CWE (1)

  • CWE-20 Improper Input Validation weakness

References