Rowhammer-like attack on SSDs can provide root privileges to attacker

Re:Rowhammer-like attack on SSDs can provide root privileges... by ericseppanen on Wednesday August 16, 2017 @07:17PM (#15032168)

Are you claiming that a random-bit-flipping attack such as targeted read disturb can cause corrupted data to be returned even through data scrambling, a first-level LDPC check and a final CRC check on the output?

From your paper: "We assume that the victim system runs a filesystem on top of MLC NAND flash-based SSD."

It seems very naive to be surprised that people would assume this is an attack on SSDs.

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Re:Rowhammer-like attack on SSDs can provide root privileges... by fulafel on Thursday August 17, 2017 @12:40AM (#15033857)

The flash weakness is clearly documented as just being part of their threat model, not part of their research. They say that their contribution is in the filesystem part of the attack, to build on a weakness proposed by a previous flash layer focued paper. So this is completely OK.

If you want to critique the flash paper, or how this paper represents that papers findings, you should turn your attention to:

Yu Cai, Augata Ghose, Yixin Luo, Ken Mai, Onur Mutlu, and Erich Haratsch. “Vulnerabilities in MLC NAND Flash Memory Programming: Experimental Analysis, Exploits, and Mitigation Techniques”. In: 23rd IEEE International Sympo- sium on High Performance Computer Architecture . 2017.

I found a PDF link too: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/b9bc/a3c9f531002854af48de12...

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Re:Rowhammer-like attack on SSDs can provide root privileges... by ericseppanen on Thursday August 17, 2017 @06:53PM (#15041811)

I agree the earlier paper shares the same misconceptions.

I don't agree that the authors of the present paper are exempt from criticism for this reason.

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