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Researchers from Google and ETH Zurich have discovered a new Rowhammer attack, dubbed Phoenix, that can compromise DDR5 memory modules from SK Hynix. The attack bypasses existing DDR5 protections and has been assigned CVE-2025-6202 with a CVSS score of 7.1. Responsible disclosure was made to affected vendors, and AMD has released a BIOS update to mitigate the risk.
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Researchers from ETH Zurich and Google have developed a new Rowhammer attack variant, Phoenix (CVE-2025-6202), that bypasses advanced DDR5 memory protections, including TRR and on-die ECC. The attack enables privilege escalation, arbitrary memory access, and cryptographic key extraction on all tested DDR5 modules from SK Hynix, with potential risk to other vendors. Mitigation is limited, with tripling DRAM refresh intervals as a temporary measure, though this may cause system instability.
Jun 29, 2026
Researchers reported that **Rowhammer** remains a practical hardware security threat, with the newer **Phoenix** technique showing that **DDR5** memory can still be manipulated despite built-in protections. The attack revives a flaw first highlighted by Google Project Zero, which demonstrated that repeatedly accessing DRAM rows could trigger adjacent bit flips and be weaponized for **privilege escalation** on x86 systems, including a Linux kernel exploit that altered page table entries and a sandbox escape from **Google Native Client**. The newer findings indicate that DDR5 mitigations have not eliminated the underlying risk, extending concerns that began with widespread **DDR3** exposure across tested laptop models. Earlier research had already shown Rowhammer was more than a reliability issue, and the latest reports suggest modern memory modules remain susceptible to carefully engineered disturbance attacks that can undermine isolation boundaries and system integrity, renewing pressure on hardware vendors to disclose affected products and strengthen defenses.
Jun 29, 2026
Researchers disclosed two GPU-based Rowhammer techniques, **`GDDRHammer`** and **`GeForge`**, that can induce bit flips in GDDR6 VRAM on certain Nvidia GPUs and break memory isolation. Tests showed the attacks against Ampere-era cards including the **RTX 3060** and **RTX A6000/RTX 6000**, where corrupted GPU page tables or page directories allowed attackers to gain read/write access to protected VRAM regions and, in some cases, remap access into host memory. The researchers said this could escalate from GPU compromise to **full control of the machine**, including root-level access to system memory. The reports said the attacks require an adversary to already run code on the target system, making shared GPU environments such as AI clusters a more plausible risk than a purely remote attack path. No in-the-wild exploitation has been reported, but the findings highlight a hardware security gap in systems where GPUs can directly access host memory. Recommended mitigations include enabling **IOMMU** in BIOS to restrict device DMA access to sensitive system memory and turning on **ECC** on supported GPUs, though both measures can impose performance or memory-capacity tradeoffs and ECC may not block every Rowhammer variant.
Jun 29, 2026