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A comment on New cloud attack takes full control of virtual machines with little effort. Parent comment

Re:New cloud attack takes full control of virtual machines w... by acobster on Friday September 02, 2016 @10:07AM (#12413114)
That's where I'm getting a little hazy. The paper says the attacker can "induce bit flips over arbitrary physical memory in a fully controlled way." Sounds a little more advanced than "largely random" to me, and based on the article it sounds like FFS is a step up from "vanilla" Rowhammer...am I missing something?
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Re:New cloud attack takes full control of virtual machines w... by ultramancool on Friday September 02, 2016 @10:54AM (#12413420)
Yeah, I mean if it won't beat a CRC wouldn't ECC RAM be a reasonably easy solution to this and wouldn't most servers already be secured against it?
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Re:New cloud attack takes full control of virtual machines w... by Dylan16807 on Friday September 02, 2016 @04:18PM (#12415966)
ECC RAM makes it a harder, but three bit flips will still survive. It depends on whether the system actually acts properly when it sees a huge amount of ECC errors happening.
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Re:New cloud attack takes full control of virtual machines w... by Dylan16807 on Friday September 02, 2016 @04:10PM (#12415901)
They can pick a bit or two per page to attack, but then they're stuck with those bits.

In theory they could attack a new bit every few minutes, but that requires a system that allows the victim page to be remapped multiple times. KSM does not; any other memory-merging system could work the same way to mitigate things.

Even if they could keep remapping, it's a very slow attack that way. Reloading the checksum every ten minutes would keep you safe.

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