51–60 of 264 posts
The kernels for Gentoo have been all over the place for the past few weeks. I'm running 4.12 at the moment, then the repos updated to 4.14, which wouldn't build for me, so I waited a week for genkernel to modernize. When I came back 4.14 had been marked unstable and 4.12 was masked, making 4.9 the latest supported kernel. Seems that whatever is happening is a Big Deal.
IMHO, with RowHammer, the hardware is broken and it will continue to be broken until users complain enough --- maybe to the point of absolutely refusing to buy --- that the manufacturers and designers stop thinking "works 99.9999999999% of the time" is good enough: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12410274
The current miniaturization of DRAM circuitry doesn't really allow for a hardware fix for the RowHammer attack. During DRAM manufacturing a test similar to the RowHammer attack exists. This test has certain bounds for passing. If the bounds were tightened up to the level of perfection to prevent the attack it would drop the yield a considerable amount.
Shouldn't cloud-grade computers be immune to rowhammer (or at least rowhammer should be much less efficient) as they typically use ECC RAM. Switching ECC RAM in a way that also modifies checksum in a deterministic way is (was?) not practical?
"Tests show that simple ECC solutions, providing single-error correction and double-error detection (SECDED) capabilities, are not able to correct or detect all observed disturbance errors because some of them include more than two flipped bits per memory word"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The current miniaturization of DRAM circuitry doesn't really allow for a hardware fix for the RowHammer attack. During DRAM manufacturing a test similar to the RowHammer attack exists. This test has certain bounds for passing. If the bounds were tightened up to the level of perfection to prevent the attack it would drop the yield a considerable amount.
If the bounds were tightened up to the level of perfection to prevent the attack it would drop the yield a considerable amount. The fact that DRAM older than a few years is effectively immune to RH suggests it is possible to manufacture such. Yes, it will cost more, but I think many would be willing to pay for it like they used to, for none other than the assurance of having more reliable memory.
IMHO, with RowHammer, the hardware is broken and it will continue to be broken until users complain enough --- maybe to the point of absolutely refusing to buy --- that the manufacturers and designers stop thinking "works 99.9999999999% of the time" is good enough: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12410274
Why would users refuse to buy hardware that works 99.9999999999% of the time when they apparently have no problem buying software that works 99% of the time? Radioactive decays and cosmic particles flipping bits give an upper bound for reliability. You are not going to see low-background packages and rad-hard chips in your iPhone.
The bare metal cloud providers will be rubbing their hands together
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would users refuse to buy hardware that works 99.9999999999% of the time when they apparently have no problem buying software that works 99% of the time? Radioactive decays and cosmic particles flipping bits give an upper bound for reliability. You are not going to see low-background packages and rad-hard chips in your iPhone.
Radioactive decays and cosmic particles flipping bits give an upper bound for reliability well below 99.9999999999% If it works 99.9999999999%, then it has a failure rate of 0.0000000001%, or 1E-12. Considering that a modern CPU executes approximately 1E9 operations per second, and that regular HDDs have a worse-case BER of 1 in 1E14 bits, 1E-12 is actually rather horrible and the actual error rate of computer hardwa…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The current miniaturization of DRAM circuitry doesn't really allow for a hardware fix for the RowHammer attack. During DRAM manufacturing a test similar to the RowHammer attack exists. This test has certain bounds for passing. If the bounds were tightened up to the level of perfection to prevent the attack it would drop the yield a considerable amount.
maybe add more bits of ECC?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Embargos do not make you secure. If the bug exists the only safe assumption is that it is already being exploited. The faster the information gets out the better.
No, but they prevent everybody with ill-intent from exploiting the issue en-masse
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I missed what happened with AWS? Any details
not sure on exact details, but I received one as well, on a free-tier account I had sitting around with an empty dynamodb table that was showing very high projected usage. it was enough that I logged in immediately thinking that account had been hacked. nope, still empty table, deleted it and went to bed. glad I wasn't the only one who got that.
I wasn't sure what was going on so I nuked everything cancelled my account and will hope for the best.