Yoongu Kim
More info
- Known for
- The paper that described Rowhammer (2014), Ramulator
- Affiliation
- Carnegie Mellon University
Lead author of the 2014 paper showing you can change bits in DRAM without ever writing to them.
As a PhD student under Onur Mutlu at Carnegie Mellon, Kim led the study Flipping Bits in Memory Without Accessing Them, presented at ISCA 2014. The team tested 129 off-the-shelf DRAM modules from three manufacturers and induced disturbance errors in 110 of them, simply by reading the same rows over and over until charge leaked into the neighbours. The effect became known as Rowhammer.
The paper was framed as a reliability study, but security people read it as instructions, and the first exploits arrived within a year. Kim also wrote Ramulator, a DRAM simulator that has become a standard tool in memory systems research.