However, such mechanisms may not be properly configured and used by the firmware and the operating system. A typical example is the IOMMU (Input-Output Memory Management Unit).
Some protection mechanisms have been implemented in modern architectures to face these attacks. These attacks are performed by malicious peripherals that make read or write accesses to DRAM memory or to memory embedded in other peripherals, through DMA (Direct Memory Access) requests. Input/output (I/O) attacks have received increasing attention during the last decade.
