lkml.org 
[lkml]   [2014]   [Dec]   [24]   [last100]   RSS Feed
Views: [wrap][no wrap]   [headers]  [forward] 
 
Messages in this thread
/
From
Date
SubjectRe: DRAM unreliable under specific access patern
On Wed, Dec 24, 2014 at 9:25 AM, Pavel Machek <pavel@ucw.cz> wrote:
> On Wed 2014-12-24 09:13:32, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
>> On Wed, Dec 24, 2014 at 8:38 AM, Pavel Machek <pavel@ucw.cz> wrote:
>> > Hi!
>> >
>> > It seems that it is easy to induce DRAM bit errors by doing repeated
>> > reads from adjacent memory cells on common hw. Details are at
>> >
>> > https://www.ece.cmu.edu/~safari/pubs/kim-isca14.pdf
>> >
>> > . Older memory modules seem to work better, and ECC should detect
>> > this. Paper has inner loop that should trigger this.
>> >
>> > Workarounds seem to be at hardware level, and tricky, too.
>>
>> One mostly-effective solution would be to stop buying computers
>> without ECC. Unfortunately, no one seems to sell non-server chips
>> that can do ECC.
>
> Or keep using old computers :-).
>
>> > Does anyone have implementation of detector? Any ideas how to work
>> > around it in software?
>> >
>>
>> Platform-dependent page coloring with very strict, and impossible to
>> implement fully correctly, page allocation constraints?
>
> This seems to be at cacheline level, not at page level, if I
> understand it correctly.
>
> So the problem would is: I have something mapped read-only, and I can
> still cause bitflips in it.
>
> Hmm. So it is pretty obviously a security problem, no need for
> java. Just do some bit flips in binary root is going to run, and it
> will crash for him. You can map binaries read-only, so you have enough
> access.

Right. So we're mostly screwed.

>
> As far as I understand it, attached program could reproduce it on
> affected machines?

I thought that article suggested using addresses 8M (is that 8
megabytes?) apart for the two accesses.

--Andy

> Pavel
> --
> (english) http://www.livejournal.com/~pavelmachek
> (cesky, pictures) http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~pavel/picture/horses/blog.html



--
Andy Lutomirski
AMA Capital Management, LLC


\
 
 \ /
  Last update: 2014-12-24 19:21    [W:0.064 / U:1.532 seconds]
©2003-2020 Jasper Spaans|hosted at Digital Ocean and TransIP|Read the blog|Advertise on this site