alt Hacker NewsIt's my long standing opinion[1] that we shouldn't accept any RAM that can be subject to random bit flips. Most of the mitigations are just security through obscurity.
Replies
e2le • yesterday at 9:41 PM
I was shocked to learn that around 10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bit flips.
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Retr0id • yesterday at 9:43 PM
Intel MEE addressed this (https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/204.pdf), by treating DRAM as entirely untrusted (assuming an attacker with arbitrary physical read/write capabilities), but then they discontinued it.
Regarding your linked comment:
> If we had properly tested and validated RAM, RowHammer wouldn't work, ever.
While it's exacerbated by physical defects and tight timings, it's really a fundamental problem with how DRAM works. It's frankly a miracle it works in the first place.
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My computer with a lot of ECC DDR5 sometimes catches several bitflips in a day. I know this because they are reported to dmesg and sometimes I look at dmesg.
Intel decided long ago that you would need to pay more to not be subject to random bitflips. So it's an AMD system.