  With the increasing use of multicore platforms to realize mixed-criticality
systems, understanding the underlying shared resources, such as the memory
hierarchy shared among cores, and achieving isolation between co-executing
tasks running on the same platform with different criticality levels becomes
relevant. In addition to safety considerations, a malicious entity can exploit
shared resources to create timing attacks on critical applications. In this
paper, we focus on understanding the shared DRAM dual in-line memory module and
created a timing attack, that we named the "bank & row conflict bomb", to
target a victim task in a multicore platform. We also created a "navigate"
algorithm to understand how victim requests are managed by the Memory
Controller and provide valuable inputs for designing the bank & row conflict
bomb. We performed experimental tests on a 2nd Gen Intel Xeon Processor with an
8GB DDR4-2666 DRAM module to show that such an attack can produce a significant
increase in the execution time of the victim task by about 150%, motivating the
need for proper countermeasures to help ensure the safety and security of
critical applications.
