Microarchitectural vulnerabilities increasingly undermine the assumption that hardware can be treated as a reliable root of trust. Prevention mechanisms often lag behind evolving attack techniques, leaving deployed systems unable to assume continued trustworthiness. We propose a shift from prevention to detection through microarchitectural-aware remote attestation. As a first instantiation of this idea, we present HammerWatch, a Rowhammer-aware remote attestation protocol that enables an external verifier to assess whether a system exhibits hardware-induced disturbance behavior. HammerWatch leverages memory-level evidence available on commodity platforms, specifically Machine-Check Exceptions (MCEs) from ECC DRAM and counter-based indicators from Per-Row Activation Counting (PRAC), and protects these measurements against kernel-level adversaries using TPM-anchored hash chains. We implement HammerWatch on commodity hardware and evaluate it on 20000 simulated benign and malicious access patterns. Our results show that the verifier reliably distinguishes Rowhammer-like behavior from benign operation under conservative heuristics, demonstrating that detection-oriented attestation is feasible and can complement incomplete prevention mechanisms

翻译：微架构漏洞日益削弱了将硬件视为可信根基的假设。防御机制往往落后于不断演进的攻击技术，导致已部署系统无法维持持续可信性。我们提出从预防转向检测的思路，通过微架构感知的远程证明实现这一转变。作为该理念的首个实例，我们提出HammerWatch——一种感知Rowhammer攻击的远程证明协议，使外部验证者能够评估系统是否表现出硬件诱导的干扰行为。HammerWatch利用通用平台上的内存级证据，具体包括ECC DRAM的机器检查异常(MCE)和每行激活计数(PRAC)的计数器指标，并通过TPM锚定的哈希链保护这些测量值免受内核级攻击者的篡改。我们在通用硬件上实现HammerWatch，并在20000个模拟的良性/恶意访问模式上进行了评估。结果表明，验证者能够基于保守启发式方法可靠地将Rowhammer类行为与良性操作区分开来，证明了面向检测的证明技术具有可行性，并可补充不完善的预防机制。