Fantastic Bitflips and Where to Find Them (and How to Tame Them)
Onur Mutlu, ETH Zurich
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This talk provides an overview of RowHammer, RowPress, and ColumnDisturb vulnerabilities that plague modern DRAM chips, which form a critical foundation of modern AI and computing infrastructures. We will cover some cutting-edge DRAM read disturbance research & developments in academia & industry. We will especially focus on recent works that rigorously discover & analyze real chip phenomena and open up new problems requiring innovative solutions. We will also discuss what other problems may be lurking in DRAM and other memory types. These new problems can threaten the foundations of robust (i.e., safe, secure, reliable, available) systems, as memory technologies scale to higher densities. We conclude by advocating a principled approach to memory robustness research that can enable us to better anticipate and prevent such vulnerabilities, as AI & computing infrastructures rapidly expand into unpredictable & harsh territories.
A short accompanying paper, which appeared at ASP-DAC 2023, can be found here and serves as recommended reading:
A longer paper that provides an overview of the RowHammer problem and research, which appeared at IEEE TCAD 2019, can be found here and serves as recommended reading:
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Bio: Onur Mutlu is a Professor of Computer Science at ETH Zurich. He previously held the William D. and Nancy W. Strecker Early Career Professorship at Carnegie Mellon University. His research interests are in computer architecture, computing systems, hardware security, memory & storage systems, and bioinformatics, with a major focus on designing fundamentally energy-efficient, high-performance, and robust computing systems. Many techniques he, with his group and collaborators, have invented over the years have largely influenced industry and have been employed in commercial microprocessors and memory & storage systems used daily by billions of people. He obtained his PhD and MS in ECE from the University of Texas at Austin and BS degrees in Computer Engineering and Psychology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He started the Computer Architecture Group at Microsoft Research (2006-2009), and held product, research and visiting positions at Intel Corporation, Advanced Micro Devices, VMware, Google, and Stanford University. He received various honors for his impactful research, including the 2025 IEEE Computer Society Harry H. Goode Memorial Award “for seminal contributions to computer architecture research and practice, especially in memory systems,” 2024 IFIP Jean-Claude Laprie Award in Dependable Computing (for the original RowHammer work), 2021 IEEE High Performance Computer Architecture Conference Test of Time Award (for the Runahead Execution work), 2022 Persistent Impact Prize of the Non-Volatile Memory Systems Workshop (for the original architectural work on Phase Change Memory), 2026 and 2025 IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks Test-of-Time Awards (for, respectively, the PARBOR and AVATAR works), 2023 Huawei OlympusMons Award in Storage Systems, 2021 Intel Outstanding Researcher Award, 2019 ACM SIGARCH Maurice Wilkes Award, and dozens of best paper, “Top Pick” paper, and Best Artifact recognitions at various leading computer systems, architecture, and security venues. He is an AAAS Fellow, ACM Fellow, IEEE Fellow, and an elected member of the Academy of Europe. He enjoys teaching, mentoring, and enabling & democratizing access to high-quality research and education. He has supervised 27 PhD graduates, many of whom received major dissertation & other awards, more than 20 postdoctoral trainees, and more than 70 Master’s and Bachelor’s students. His computer architecture and digital logic design course lectures and materials are freely available on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/OnurMutluLectures & https://www.youtube.com/@CMUCompArch), and his research group (https://safari.ethz.ch/) makes a wide variety of open-source artifacts freely available online (https://github.com/CMU-SAFARI). For more information, please see his webpage at https://people.inf.ethz.ch/omutlu/.