PIMROP: A Feasibility Study of Return-Oriented Programming on Commercial Processing-in-Memory Architectures

arXiv:2611.06036v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Processing-in-Memory places small programmable cores on the memory device, where they execute beside the DRAM banks and beyond the control-flow defenses that protect host programs. The security of this in-memory code is an attack surface that remains largely unstudied. We present PIMROP, to our knowledge the first demonstrated code-reuse attack on a commercial Processing in-Memory ISA. We show that return-oriented programming is feasible on a real, commercially shipped PIM instruction set, the UPMEM DPU, whose DRAM Processing Units run C compiled by a dedicated LLVM toolchain.