News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Intel’s first Optane SSD: 375GB that you can also use as RAM by Negitivefrags on Sunday March 19, 2017 @04:06PM (#13909312)
A buffer overrun can't overwrite random memory that isn't mapped into your process. We solved this issue with virtual memory like 35 years ago.
Re:Intel’s first Optane SSD: 375GB that you can also use as RAM by viraptor on Monday March 20, 2017 @03:16AM (#13912358)
Kind of... We solved this issue like 35 years ago and then broke it again in the last decade. First CPU timing attacks allowed peeking at secret key generation in shared environments. Then we got rowhammer which ignores your mapping. Now we got memory access timing attacks which allow probing kernel memory mapping and bypassing ASLR.

While you can't easily write into other processes anymore, the barrier is more of a suggestion again.

Re:Intel’s first Optane SSD: 375GB that you can also use as RAM by hatsunearu on Monday March 20, 2017 @08:26PM (#13918845)
"ignores your mapping" is pretty generous considering rowhammer doesn't work on ECC RAM.
Re:Intel’s first Optane SSD: 375GB that you can also use as RAM by viraptor on Tuesday March 21, 2017 @05:43AM (#13920848)
From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Row_hammer

> Tests show that simple ECC solutions, providing single-error correction and double-error detection (SECDED) capabilities, are not able to correct or detect all observed disturbance errors because some of them include more than two flipped bits per memory word

But anyway - even if ECC was perfect at preventing the issue, lots of hosts do not use ECC. That includes practically every desktop.

Re:Intel’s first Optane SSD: 375GB that you can also use as RAM by analognoise on Sunday March 19, 2017 @06:22PM (#13910022)
So you're saying there will be a web assembly version in a few years that will claim to be a huge advancement?
Re:Intel’s first Optane SSD: 375GB that you can also use as RAM by lacampbell on Sunday March 19, 2017 @07:31PM (#13910486)
Yeah, just like that time microsoft invented lambda functions
Re:Intel’s first Optane SSD: 375GB that you can also use as RAM by PhilWright on Sunday March 19, 2017 @10:55PM (#13911367)
Correct, but in practice memory has permissions on a page level and most pages today are 4K. So a page containing a buffer is also likely to contain other data as well. Unless you are going to isolate each buffer by placing it in its own page.
Re:Intel’s first Optane SSD: 375GB that you can also use as RAM by rybosome on Monday March 20, 2017 @12:41AM (#13911753)
That doesn't make sense to me. So an OS will assign a 4K page of memory to multiple processes, with some granularity that each process "should" only be able to write/read some of it?
Re:Intel’s first Optane SSD: 375GB that you can also use as RAM by e12e on Monday March 20, 2017 @11:20AM (#13914908)
So your 1tb linked-list/hashtable that holds all the mail servers email, and is conveniently persisted because ram is the disk, and everything on the heap is magically permanent - isn't at risk?