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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.
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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.
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
University of Toronto researchers disclosed **GPUThor**, a GPU-based Rowhammer technique that can bypass practical protections provided by SECDED ECC on certain NVIDIA Ampere workstation GPUs using GDDR6 memory, including the RTX A6000. By using a non-uniform memory-hammering pattern that accounts for undocumented request coalescing and Target Row Refresh behavior, the technique substantially increases bit-flip rates and can trigger uncorrectable double-bit errors or incorrect repair of triple-bit errors. An attacker needs to execute an unprivileged CUDA kernel, creating risk in shared GPU-tenancy environments and from untrusted local GPU workloads. The researchers demonstrated data corruption and GPU denial of service and described a path to host root privilege escalation through GPU page-table corruption. NVIDIA recommends enabling System-Level ECC (SYS-ECC), enforcing IOMMU/DMA isolation, monitoring GPU ECC telemetry, and restricting untrusted or cross-tenant GPU workloads; no CVE, patch, or confirmed in-the-wild exploitation was reported.
Aug 28, 2026