New cloud attack takes full control of virtual machines with little effort

Re:New cloud attack takes full control of virtual machines w... by wepple on Friday September 02, 2016 @06:52AM (#12412140)

without being an expert in this area; my gut feel is that the fix to this problem is likely going to be funded by the end user. Given that competition continues to drive prices down, would 'secure ram' be viable? would you pay more for it?

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Re:New cloud attack takes full control of virtual machines w... by userbinator on Friday September 02, 2016 @07:07AM (#12412180)

Given that competition continues to drive prices down, would 'secure ram' be viable? would you pay more for it?

It's funny you mention this, since the problem only affects newer DDR3 and DDR4 modules and older RAM (EDO modules are apparently still in limited production and being sold) does tend to be significantly more expensive. Unfortunately the rest of the hardware needs to be compatible.

This also means all the older hardware that gets scrapped in massive quantities daily is likely to contain RAM immune to this problem, which is somewhat ironic... maybe it's just a (sad) continuation of the "newer is more volatile" trend that can be traced back to thousand-year-old stone tablets which remain readable today.

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Re:New cloud attack takes full control of virtual machines w... by marcosdumay on Friday September 02, 2016 @12:04PM (#12413956)

Not stone, but clay tablets are probably more volatile than your USB drive. There's a huge sampling bias here.

About the main point, why isn't ECC fixing this for everybody? I'll surely get cheaper, more volatile RAM, and use some of it on redundancy so it works better than the more expensive, less volatile kind.

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Re:New cloud attack takes full control of virtual machines w... by GTP on Friday September 02, 2016 @09:47AM (#12412996)

I have the same opinion as you. I would but most people wouldn't. The root cause of the problem is since the trend about ram is "the bigger the better" (in terms of GBs) we have tons of capacitors on a small surface. I'm no expert too but I think there's no simple hardware fix for this instead of returning back to RAMs that hold less memory, but most people won't accept it. Maybe we're hitting the limits of the current technology and we should switch to another one. Just on a side note two years ago one of my professors quoted an ongoing research in my university about RAM that instead of storing electrons formed crystals, but I don't know any other detail about this.

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