arXiv Machine Learning By Jinsheng Yuan, Yuhang Hao, Weisi Guo, Yun Wu, Chongyan Gu

Remote Rowhammer Attack using Adversarial Observations on Federated Learning Clients

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The paper demonstrates a novel remote Rowhammer attack that targets federated learning (FL) servers by manipulating client sensor observations to induce repetitive clustered memory updates. Using a reinforcement learning attacker, the authors show that they can achieve approximately 70% repeated update rate in FL systems with sparse updates, leading to bit‑flips in the server’s DRAM during tasks such as automatic speech recognition and CIFAR‑10 classification. This work highlights a previously underexplored vulnerability where client‑side adversarial behavior can compromise server memory integrity in FL environments.

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