ColumnDisturb: Understanding Column-based Read Disturbance in Real DRAM Chips and Implications for Future Systems

We experimentally demonstrate a new widespread read disturbance phenomenon, ColumnDisturb, in real commodity DRAM chips. By repeatedly opening or keeping a DRAM row (aggressor row) open, we show that it is possible to disturb DRAM cells through a DRAM column (i.e., bitline) and induce bitflips in DRAM cells sharing the same columns as the aggressor row (across multiple DRAM subarrays). With ColumnDisturb, the activation of a single row concurrently disturbs DRAM cells across as many as three DRAM subarrays (e.g., up to 3072 DRAM rows in tested DDR4 DRAM chips) as opposed to RowHammer & RowPress, which affect only a few neighboring rows of the aggressor row in a single subarray. We rigorously and comprehensively characterize ColumnDisturb and its characteristics under various operational conditions (i.e., temperature, data pattern, DRAM timing parameters, average voltage level of the bitline, memory access pattern, and spatial variation) using 216 DDR4 and 4 HBM2 chips from three major DRAM manufacturers. Among our 27 key experimental observations, we highlight two major results and their implications.First, ColumnDisturb affects chips from all three major DRAM manufacturers and worsens as DRAM technology scales down to smaller node sizes (e.g., the minimum time to induce the first ColumnDisturb bitflip reduces by up to 5.06x and 2.96x on average across all tested modules). We observe that, even in existing DRAM chips, ColumnDisturb induces bitflips within a nominal DDR4 refresh window (e.g., in 63.6 ms) in multiple cells from one module. We predict that, as DRAM technology node size reduces, ColumnDisturb would worsen in future DRAM chips, likely causing many more bitflips in the nominal refresh window. Second, beyond the nominal refresh window, ColumnDisturb induces bitflips in many (up to 198x) more DRAM rows than retention failures. Therefore, ColumnDisturb has strong implications for existing retention-aware refresh mechanisms that aim to improve system performance and energy efficiency by leveraging the heterogeneity in DRAM cell retention times: our detailed analyses and cycle-level simulations show that ColumnDisturb greatly reduces and can completely diminish the performance and energy benefits of such mechanisms.Our results have serious implications for the robustness of future DRAM-based computing systems due to continued aggressive DRAM technology scaling. We describe and evaluate two solutions for mitigating read disturbance bitflips in the presence of ColumnDisturb and call for more research on the topic.