Google says Rowhammer attacks are gaining range as RAM is getting denser • Hacker News Board

Re: Google says Rowhammer attacks are gaining range as RAM is getting denser

#121

Post by josh2600 » Sat, May 29, 2021, 10:13 PM UTC

tooltower wrote: post #60

josh2600 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean the punchline is: if you heat something up enough then you can get electrons to wiggle. At some level of cell wall thickness, the cost/time/annoyance of triggering a rowhammer exceeds the value of the attack, and other methods become cheaper or more practical. Ultimately, nothing that an attacker has physical access to can be completely secured, we can only raise the cost in terms of time and money to attempt…

We are not talking about physical attacks. Neither are we talking about attacks based purely on heating up the DRAM chips. The topic here is a remote attacker who can target specific words or bits to be flipped.

When bits are flipped in a row hammer attack, what is happening to the dram? Most people would argue the energetic potential is increasing causing a failure of the boundary between cells...

Re: Google says Rowhammer attacks are gaining range as RAM is getting denser

#122

Post by userbinator » Sat, May 29, 2021, 10:49 PM UTC

marcan_42 wrote: post #86

userbinator wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ECC is at best a temporary workaround, and at worst an implicit approval of the creation of defective products. It's purpose is to prevent transient bitflips due to cosmic rays and such, not consistently reproducible errors from what is otherwise perfectly normal operation. Plus you can detect attack attempts as the memory controller will report increased error rates. Now you've turned specific access patterns into "…

> ECC is at best a temporary workaround, and at worst an implicit approval of the creation of defective products. It's purpose is to prevent transient bitflips due to cosmic rays and such, not consistently reproducible errors from what is otherwise perfectly normal operation. No, ECC is there to correct any errors, including normal errors that occur during operation. It allows us to build technologies that have a muc…

Ever heard of files you can't burn on CD-R

I know about weak sectors. Only shitty (i.e. defective by design) drives wouldn't be able to handle them, while others would do it just fine.

Why are you drawing an arbitrary line for RAM and saying it can't use ECC?

I'm not saying that ECC is not a good idea. I'm saying that ECC errors in RAM occurring simply because of specific access patterns is far from "normal operation". In fact, if you use ECC RAM and see a lot of errors, it should be considered a sign of failing hardware. In other words, advocating for ECC in this scenario is deflecting the blame and compensating for a defective product.

The solution is simple: don't buy QLC flash. That stuff's garbage, at least today

"QLC" and "TLC" are complete misnomers developed specifically to hide the truth. It's not 4 or 3 "levels", but 16 and 8, respectively. 16LC and 8LC are the technically correct terms.

Corporate greed has somehow resulted in everyone parroting the dominant industry position and using Intel and ECC as a scapegoat. That just shows how entrenched their propaganda is.

Re: Google says Rowhammer attacks are gaining range as RAM is getting denser

#123

Post by marcan_42 » Sun, May 30, 2021, 2:37 AM UTC

femiagbabiaka wrote: post #112

marcan_42 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem isn't RowHammer, the problem is lack of ECC. This is mostly Intel's fault, as they cripple their consumer CPU lines to disable ECC for market segmentation purposes. The entire premise that we can store tens of gigabytes of information reliably in tiny silicon capacitors without any error detection or correction whatsoever is ludicrous. Every other storage technology uses advanced error correction - NAND F…

I thought ECC wasn’t effective protection against Rowhammer? Agreed that it is incredibly useful otherwise. https://www.vusec.net/projects/eccploit/

ECC helps a lot, and combined with memory encryption (which is another thing we should be doing) it effectively mitigates the issue, as then you can't target specific bits any more, so your chances of getting past ECC without causing hard errors are negligible.

Re: Google says Rowhammer attacks are gaining range as RAM is getting denser

#124

Post by marcan_42 » Sun, May 30, 2021, 2:42 AM UTC

userbinator wrote: post #122

marcan_42 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ECC is at best a temporary workaround, and at worst an implicit approval of the creation of defective products. It's purpose is to prevent transient bitflips due to cosmic rays and such, not consistently reproducible errors from what is otherwise perfectly normal operation. No, ECC is there to correct any errors, including normal errors that occur during operation. It allows us to build technologies that have a muc…

Ever heard of files you can't burn on CD-R I know about weak sectors. Only shitty (i.e. defective by design) drives wouldn't be able to handle them, while others would do it just fine. Why are you drawing an arbitrary line for RAM and saying it can't use ECC? I'm not saying that ECC is not a good idea. I'm saying that ECC errors in RAM occurring simply because of specific access patterns is far from "normal operation…

> "QLC" and "TLC" are complete misnomers developed specifically to hide the truth.

I know what those terms mean. I find it amusing that you'd think I don't, given I just rattled off the ECC types used by a dozen technologies and mentioned 3 different kinds of nonvolatile charge trap memory.

Re: Google says Rowhammer attacks are gaining range as RAM is getting denser

#125

Post by rasz » Sun, May 30, 2021, 6:07 AM UTC

Zenst wrote: post #104

marcan_42 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem isn't RowHammer, the problem is lack of ECC. This is mostly Intel's fault, as they cripple their consumer CPU lines to disable ECC for market segmentation purposes. The entire premise that we can store tens of gigabytes of information reliably in tiny silicon capacitors without any error detection or correction whatsoever is ludicrous. Every other storage technology uses advanced error correction - NAND F…

> The problem isn't RowHammer, the problem is lack of ECC. This is mostly Intel's fault, as they cripple their consumer CPU lines to disable ECC for market segmentation purposes. Whilst Intel did play a part, when they offered it as standard the uptake in the consumer market was low and the price factor and need at most consumer level was not there. Today it is there, though the consumer mindset is unaware of it and…

Please, The ONLY time Intel offered ECC as standard on its products was during brief 486 period when all chipsets the offered were considered highend and their chipset market share was in single digits.

ECC was standard on first IBM PC 5150, on PS/2 line, on pretty much all 286 clones etc.

Intel market segmentation shenanigans started around 1995 with Pentium line, with ECC absent from all consumer oriented product lines.

Re: Google says Rowhammer attacks are gaining range as RAM is getting denser

#126

Post by Zenst » Tue, Jun 01, 2021, 3:09 PM UTC

rasz wrote: post #125

Zenst wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem isn't RowHammer, the problem is lack of ECC. This is mostly Intel's fault, as they cripple their consumer CPU lines to disable ECC for market segmentation purposes. Whilst Intel did play a part, when they offered it as standard the uptake in the consumer market was low and the price factor and need at most consumer level was not there. Today it is there, though the consumer mindset is unaware of it and…

Please, The ONLY time Intel offered ECC as standard on its products was during brief 486 period when all chipsets the offered were considered highend and their chipset market share was in single digits. ECC was standard on first IBM PC 5150, on PS/2 line, on pretty much all 286 clones etc. Intel market segmentation shenanigans started around 1995 with Pentium line, with ECC absent from all consumer oriented product l…

True, the whole dip into RAMBUS kinda saw them shift things and when they came back to less niched out RAM, they split things business and consumer.

however, been some odd glimmer of hope for the cheaper end for ECC suport from Intel - https://www.truenas.com/community/threads/surprise-surprise-...

What really needs to happen is all these AMD Ryzen users to buy into ECC, help get the price down and more so, push Intel in another tickbox catchup in that market.

Re: Google says Rowhammer attacks are gaining range as RAM is getting denser

#127

Post by rasz » Tue, Jun 01, 2021, 5:36 PM UTC

Zenst wrote: post #126

rasz wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please, The ONLY time Intel offered ECC as standard on its products was during brief 486 period when all chipsets the offered were considered highend and their chipset market share was in single digits. ECC was standard on first IBM PC 5150, on PS/2 line, on pretty much all 286 clones etc. Intel market segmentation shenanigans started around 1995 with Pentium line, with ECC absent from all consumer oriented product l…

True, the whole dip into RAMBUS kinda saw them shift things and when they came back to less niched out RAM, they split things business and consumer. however, been some odd glimmer of hope for the cheaper end for ECC suport from Intel - https://www.truenas.com/community/threads/surprise-surprise-... What really needs to happen is all these AMD Ryzen users to buy into ECC, help get the price down and more so, push Inte…

Intel cut ECC from its consumer chipsets almost 10 years before Rambus.