Michele Marazzi, PhD

I have a PhD in hardware and computer security obtained from ETH Zurich. My main research field has been DRAM security, and included security analysis of protocols, design of mitigations, proofs-of-security, timing side channels, fuzzer implementation, benchmarking, cycle-accurate full-system simulation, IC imaging via SEM and FIB, circuit reverse engineering, and analog simulations.

Recently, I showed how to obtain Rowhammer bit flips on RISC-V for the first time. Before, we reverse engineered commodity DRAM devices, demonstrated attacks on public transport applications, and designed secure in-DRAM Rowhammer mitigations.

For my Master, I studied Biomedical Engineering at POLIMI, with a focus over electronics technologies (BTE). I graduated with 110/110 cum Laude and a course average grade of 29.8/30 (GPA 3.97/4, top 1%).

Email / Linkedin / Publications List

Reviewer for: DRAMSec'25, ISC'25
External reviewer for: Usenix ATC'22, ACM SIGMETRICS'22, DRAMSec'23, ISCA'24

In the news:

(2024) Researchers outsmarted EasyRide function on Swiss travel app.
(2022) Securing computer memory against attacks.

Recorded presentations:

(2024) HiFi-DRAM: Enabling High-Fidelity DRAM Research by Uncovering Sense Amplifiers with IC Imaging July 2024, Buenos Aires, ISCA (best paper award session).
(2024) Research is Lagging Behind: Reverse Engineering DRAM Circuits September 2024, Italy, Metro Olografix Camp (MOCA).
(2023) REGA: Scalable Rowhammer Mitigation with Refresh-Generating Activations May 2023, San Francisco, IEEE S&P.
(2022) ProTRR: Principled yet Optimal In-DRAM Target Row Refresh May 2022, San Francisco, IEEE S&P.

Major Publications:
(2025) McSee: Evaluating Advanced Rowhammer Attacks and Defenses via Automated DRAM Traffic Analysis — USENIX Security
Patrick Jattke, Michele Marazzi, Flavien Solt, Max Wipfli, Stefan Gloor, Kaveh Razavi

(2024) PayRide: Secure Transport e-Ticketing with Untrusted Smartphone Location — DIMVA
Michele Marazzi, Patrick Jattke, Jason Zibung, Kaveh Razavi

(2024) HiFi-DRAM: Enabling High-Fidelity DRAM Research by Uncovering Sense Amplifiers with IC Imaging — ISCA
Michele Marazzi, Tristan Sachsenweger, Flavien Solt, Peng Zeng, Kubo Takashi, Maksym Yarema, Kaveh Razavi

(2024) ZenHammer: Rowhammer Attacks on AMD Zen-based Platforms — USENIX Security
Patrick Jattke, Max Wipfli, Flavien Solt, Michele Marazzi, Matej Bölcskei, Kaveh Razavi

(2024) RISC-H: Rowhammer Attacks on RISC-V — DRAMSec
Michele Marazzi, Kaveh Razavi

(2023) REGA: Scalable Rowhammer Mitigation with Refresh-Generating Activations — IEEE S&P
Michele Marazzi, Flavien Solt, Patrick Jattke, Kubo Takashi, Kaveh Razavi

(2022) ProTRR: Principled yet optimal in-DRAM target row refresh — IEEE S&P
Michele Marazzi, Patrick Jattke, Flavien Solt, Kaveh Razavi

Scholarships, Awards and Competitions:

(2025) ProTRR has been awarded the Top Picks in Hardware and Embedded Security 2024.
(2024) HiFi-DRAM nominated for best paper at ISCA.
(2022) CSAW Applied Research Competition (ARC) finalist with ProTRR.
(2018) Scholarship for "Master Thesis abroad". - Polytechnic University of Milan.
(2018) Student with high merits. - Polytechnic University of Milan.

Recent extra/invited presentations:

(2024) IBM Research, Switzerland.
(2024) Memory Security track, Hardwear.io, The Netherlands.
(2024) Hardware Security course, ETH Zurich, Switzerland.
(2023) Hardware Security course, ETH Zurich, Switzerland.
(2022) Industry day, ETH Zurich, Switzerland.
(2022) The Systems Group, ETH Zurich, Switzerland.
(2022) Hardware Security course, ETH Zurich, Switzerland.
(2018) Research day, ETH Zurich, Switzerland.

Short write-ups:

(2020) Injecting code into 32bit binary with ASLR (Reversing / Security).
(2020) CTF: Level 2 of Practical Binary Analysis challenges (Reversing / CTF).
(2020) CTF: Challenge 45 from Dennis Yurichev - Bruteforcing copyprotection with Python (Reversing / CTF).

Older projects