How much/what hardware does the rowhammer DRAM bug affects?

Georgi Guninski guninski at guninski.com
Wed Sep 16 21:51:03 PDT 2015


On Wed, Sep 16, 2015 at 11:46:26PM -0400, grarpamp wrote:
> 
> 
> Some paper has said systems using ECC RAM are resistant / immune
> to rowhammer.
> 
> There is still a fair bump in cost for ECC system
> however once you've seen your first syslog entry
> you forget about the cost. Regardless of rowhammer.

ECC appears controversial:

http://blog.erratasec.com/2015/03/some-notes-on-dram-rowhammer.html

===
Update: This is really just meant as a primer, as background on the
issue, not really trying to derive any conclusions. I chatted a bit
Chris Evans (@scarybeasts) from google about some of those conclusion,
so I thought I'd expand a bit on them.

Does ECC protect you? Maybe not. While it will correct single bit flips
most of the time, it won't protect when multiple bits flip at once. The
hacker may be able to achieve this with enough tries. Remember: the
hacker's code can keep retrying this until it succeeds, even if that
takes hours.
===





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