ScaleDisturb: Exploiting Temporal Asymmetry to Amplify Read Disturbance in Modern DRAM Chips

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 5 Jun 2026] ScaleDisturb: Exploiting Temporal Asymmetry to Amplify Read Disturbance in Modern DRAM Chips Jikun Wang, Haocong Luo, Ataberk Olgun, İsmail Emir Yüksel, A. Giray Yağlıkçı, Yu Liang, F. Nisa Bostancı, Mohammad Sadrosadati, Onur Mutlu DRAM suffers from read disturbance phenomena (e.g., RowHammer and RowPress), where repeatedly accessing or continuously keeping open a DRAM row (aggressor row) induces bitflips in other physically nearby unaccessed rows (victim rows). The disturbance mechanism is practically exploitable from the software stack and worsens across generations with continued density scaling. DRAM read disturbance is highly sensitive to memory access patterns, yet prior work explores read disturbance under only a limited set of access patterns. We present ScaleDisturb, a new DRAM access pattern that can amplify DRAM read disturbance by asymmetrically extending the open time of two aggressor rows. Our rigorous experimental characterization of 196 DDR4 and 3 HBM2 DRAM chips shows that ScaleDisturb (1) leads to bitflips at significantly fewer row activations, compared to state-of-the-art memory access patterns, (2) makes read disturbance attacks easier across all tested DRAM chips, (3) increases DRAM vulnerability to read disturbance as DRAM manufacturing technology scales down to smaller node sizes. We showcase a proof-of-concept attack on a real system where a user-level program leveraging ScaleDisturb induces more bitflips than state-of-the-art RowHammer and RowPress memory access patterns. We describe and evaluate four solutions for mitigating read disturbance bitflips in the presence of ScaleDisturb and call for more research on the topic. Comments: To appear in DSN 2026 Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Hardware Architecture (cs.AR) Cite as: arXiv:2606.07761 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2606.07761v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.07761 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Jikun Wang [view email] [v1] Fri, 5 Jun 2026 18:21:16 UTC (1,548 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-06 Change to browse by: cs cs.AR References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)