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RAMBleed Attack – Reading Bits in Memory Without Accessing Them

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Re: RAMBleed Attack – Reading Bits in Memory Without Accessing Them

#61

Post by opencl »

expliced wrote: post #31
the8472 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this attack is a concern then so is rowhammer. So you can basically ask whether cloud providers have mitigated rowhammer. AMD's SEV might help protecting VMs from each other.

>unlike Rowhammer, RAMBleed does not require persistent bit flips, and is thus effective against ECC memory commonly used by server computers. Seems like mitigations for Rowhammer is not enough for RAMBleed.

SEV is a completely different thing than ECC. It encrypts the memory. RAMBleed reads raw physical bits which are encrypted and thus useless when SEV is enabled.

The paper even specifically says that SEV and other similar technologies protect against this.

Re: RAMBleed Attack – Reading Bits in Memory Without Accessing Them

#62

Post by thatcat »

air7 wrote: post #56

This is a tangent, but I find it (somewhat) annoying when f.a.q's don't answer their own questions. I see this happen occasionally and I always wonder if it's intentional to side-step an issue by raising it yourself, and then answering something else. > Can RAMBleed be detected by antivirus? > We believe that it is very unlikely that any antivirus software on the market currently detects RAMBleed.

Seems like this would happen when many people ask the same question and you don't have an answer so you post the best response you can.

Re: RAMBleed Attack – Reading Bits in Memory Without Accessing Them

#63

Post by sumnulu »

air7 wrote: post #56

This is a tangent, but I find it (somewhat) annoying when f.a.q's don't answer their own questions. I see this happen occasionally and I always wonder if it's intentional to side-step an issue by raising it yourself, and then answering something else. > Can RAMBleed be detected by antivirus? > We believe that it is very unlikely that any antivirus software on the market currently detects RAMBleed.

I find it the other way around annoying, talking in absolutes when one is not sure.

Re: RAMBleed Attack – Reading Bits in Memory Without Accessing Them

#64

Post by tareqak »

2bitencryption wrote: post #35
tareqak wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I forget if heartbleed was the first one to a have a homepage or the first one to have a catchy name, but it was to help with the public relations angle of convincing CIOs or their equivalents in an organization to take the problem seriously AFAIK. Someone else here can probably answer it better.

On this subject, I'd love to see a full history of the "branded vulnerability" thing.

Here is a link up thread with 'patio11's take on it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20158079 .

Re: RAMBleed Attack – Reading Bits in Memory Without Accessing Them

#65

Post by javert »

I want to find a way to run each application I use on its own machine so that memory attacks (like spectre/meltdown, etc.) are theoretically impossible.

I still want to have a reasonable computing experience (e.g. copy + paste works and the experience is kind of like using one computer the normal way).

Any ideas? I was thinking some kind of remote desktop setup with a bunch of cheap boxes, each running Linux, on a LAN.

Re: RAMBleed Attack – Reading Bits in Memory Without Accessing Them

#66

Post by viraptor »

arpa wrote: post #58
xamuel wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine if human beings could be vulnerable to such attacks. Someone sends you a video link, you watch it, you see weird shapes appearing and disappearing for a few minutes, then the next thing you know, you wake up in a bathtub full of ice-cubes with one of your kidneys stolen.

Sounds like you'd enjoy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLIT_(short_story)

Also Snowcrash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash

Re: RAMBleed Attack – Reading Bits in Memory Without Accessing Them

#67

Post by ken »

brianberns wrote: post #51
manifestsilence wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's actually a pretty cool thought. I've always scoffed at philosophies along the lines of, "what if it's all a dream/simulation" because if it's perfect, and you only escape it through death, what's the point of holding that view? But if there's a chink in the armor, it becomes suddenly very interesting. Not that I think that's likely to pan out since it so badly violates Occam's Razor, but it's an interesting po…

It might not be as unlikely as you think: https://www.newyorker.com/books/joshua-rothman/what-are-the-...

These arguments seem entirely unconvincing to me, in the same way that the Fermi Paradox is. Let's take some small numbers (which we got mostly by guesses, not experimentation), multiply them together, and then be shocked at what a tiny number it is.

Re: RAMBleed Attack – Reading Bits in Memory Without Accessing Them

#68

Post by tedunangst »

air7 wrote: post #56

This is a tangent, but I find it (somewhat) annoying when f.a.q's don't answer their own questions. I see this happen occasionally and I always wonder if it's intentional to side-step an issue by raising it yourself, and then answering something else. > Can RAMBleed be detected by antivirus? > We believe that it is very unlikely that any antivirus software on the market currently detects RAMBleed.

What should they say? It's theoretically possible for any AV to detect the bug (how else did they prove it exists?) but a simple "Yes" hardly conveys accurate information.

Re: RAMBleed Attack – Reading Bits in Memory Without Accessing Them

#69

Post by blablabla123 »

javert wrote: post #65

I want to find a way to run each application I use on its own machine so that memory attacks (like spectre/meltdown, etc.) are theoretically impossible. I still want to have a reasonable computing experience (e.g. copy + paste works and the experience is kind of like using one computer the normal way). Any ideas? I was thinking some kind of remote desktop setup with a bunch of cheap boxes, each running Linux, on a LA…

Plan 9 is really radical about this, but I'm not sure how secure that would be in practice: http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/net/

But the computing experience is quite unreasonable - with copy&paste working though ;)

Re: RAMBleed Attack – Reading Bits in Memory Without Accessing Them

#70

Post by ken »

akersten wrote: post #30

I am so torn about the whole vulnerability branding thing. On the one hand, it gives a great amount of visibility and motivation for brass to actually provide for getting prod patched when IT might not have had the political capital to do so otherwise. But on the other hand, I think about things like: -- What happens when the cure is worse than the disease (some variants of Spectre), and we "have to" patch because ot…

Spectre ended up being a handful of (non-contiguous) CVEs. It's much easier to talk about "Spectre" as a class of vulnerability than "these 6 CVEs and also that other variant that doesn't have a CVE yet".

What happens next year when there's a new way to bleed RAM? If it's anything like Spectre, we'll call it "RAMBleed Variant 2", and assign it a new CVE.

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