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Row hammer (also written as rowhammer) is an unintended side effect in dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) that causes memory cells to leak their charges and interact electrically between themselves, possibly altering the contents of nearby memory rows that were not addressed in the original memory access. This circumvention of the isolation between DRAM memory cells results from the high cell density in modern DRAM, and can be triggered by specially crafted memory access patterns that rapidly activate the same memory rows numerous times. The row hammer effect has been used in some privilege escalation computer security exploits.〔 Different hardware-based techniques exist to prevent the row hammer effect from occurring, including required support in some processors and types of DRAM memory modules. == Background == In dynamic RAM (DRAM), each bit of stored data occupies a separate memory cell that is electrically implemented with one capacitor and one transistor. The charge state of a capacitor (charged or discharged) is what determines whether a DRAM cell stores "1" or "0" as a binary value. Huge numbers of DRAM memory cells are packed into integrated circuits, together with some additional logic that organizes the cells for the purposes of reading, writing and refreshing the data. Memory cells (blue squares in the illustration provided in this section) are further organized into matrices and addressed through rows and columns. A memory address applied to a matrix is broken into the row address and column address, which are processed by the row and column address decoders (in the illustration, vertical and horizontal green rectangles, respectively). After a row address selects the row for a read operation (the selection is also known as row activation), bits from all cells in the row are transferred into the sense amplifiers that form the row buffer (red squares in the illustration), from which the exact bit is selected using the column address. Read operations are of a destructive nature because the design of DRAM requires memory cells to be rewritten after their values have been read. Write operations decode the addresses in a similar way, but as a result of the design entire rows must be rewritten for the value of a single bit to be changed.〔〔〔 As a result of storing data bits using capacitors that have a natural discharge rate, DRAM memory cells lose their state over time and require periodic rewriting of all memory cells, which is a process known as refreshing.〔〔 As another result of the design, DRAM memory is susceptible to random changes in stored data, which are known as soft memory errors and attributed to cosmic rays and other causes. There are different techniques that counteract soft memory errors and improve the reliability of DRAM, of which error-correcting code (ECC) memory and its advanced variants (such as lockstep memory) are most commonly used. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア(Wikipedia)』 ■ウィキペディアで「row hammer」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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