Rowhammer attacks — first discussed in 2014 — involve repeatedly accessing a row of memory in an effort to cause bit flips in adjacent rows, which can be useful for by passing memory protections. A malicious actor could use Rowhammer to escalate privileges and for other purposes, and researchers have demonstrated over the past years that attacks can be launched remotely and against mobile devices.

JEDEC, an organization that develops open standards and publications for the microelectronics industry, has warned that Rowhammer attacks can pose a “serious threat to cloud service providers, data centers, laptops, smart phones, self-driving cars and IoT devices.”