Dynamic Rowhammer Threshold Management: Temperature-Aware Threshold for In-DRAM Defenses

arXiv:2607.10392 · cs.AR, cs.CR · Submitted 2026-07-11 · Read on arXiv

Aziz Alajmi, Hoeseok Yang

cs.AR, cs.CR

Submitted: 2026-07-11

Comments: Presented at the Sixth Workshop on DRAM Security (DRAMSec 2026), June 2026

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The gist: In-DRAM Rowhammer defenses pin the mitigation threshold at manufacture time, yet the true Rowhammer Threshold (TRHD) varies with runtime temperature.

Terminology

Abstract

In-DRAM Rowhammer defenses pin the mitigation threshold at manufacture time, yet the true Rowhammer Threshold (TRHD) varies with runtime temperature. We propose Dynamic Rowhammer Threshold Management, a defense-agnostic runtime layer that re-sources each defense's threshold from the observed temperature once per epoch via a linear- T model with a VRD-motivated guardband g, projecting the result onto SALT-C, PRAC, and TRR through each defense's threshold parameter. A decoupled oracle that scales physical TRHD per-DIMM by delta about N(1, sigma) breaks model self-consistency. The layer drives PRAC's 72 staleness breaches at 85 C to zero; at sigma = 0.10, sweeping g collapses PRAC breaches from 38.4 (g = 1.0) to 9.6 (g = 0.9). SALT-C drops from 10 nominal-static breaches to 2 (Dynamic) to 0 (bootstrap), at at most 5.1% latency. TRR is capacity-limited; the layer acts as a diagnostic.

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