Re:The mysterious case of the Linux Page Table Isolation pat...
by avian on Monday January 01, 2018 @01:26PM
(#16047241)
I edited my reply to remove the actual number. The argument still stands that you cannot expect 100% reliability.
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Re:The mysterious case of the Linux Page Table Isolation pat...
by blattimwind on Monday January 01, 2018 @02:50PM
(#16047676)
Generally speaking, a piece of JavaScript in some 0x0 pixel iframe in a tab you're not even looking at can't summon cosmic particles to manipulate your computer's main memory. Rowhammer can.
Re:The mysterious case of the Linux Page Table Isolation pat...
by monochromatic on Monday January 01, 2018 @02:02PM
(#16047440)
A small probability of random errors can be lived with. Errors that can be triggered and exploited are unacceptable.
Re:The mysterious case of the Linux Page Table Isolation pat...
by brians on Monday January 01, 2018 @04:19PM
(#16048111)
No, but it’s straightforward engineering to prevent many of these problems. Error-correcting codes have been well understood for most of a century. Yes, it costs in performance and in money. For life-safety applications, it shouldn’t be optional.
Amazon is hosting life-safety applications in EC2. Commodity x86 hardware is grossly negligent for that environment.
Re:The mysterious case of the Linux Page Table Isolation pat...
by jchw on Monday January 01, 2018 @07:55PM
(#16049020)
ECC as it is today may not be sufficient. It's mostly useful against single bit flips. Probably better than nothing, though...
Re:The mysterious case of the Linux Page Table Isolation pat...
by brians on Monday January 01, 2018 @10:43PM
(#16049709)
ECC alone is absolutely insufficient. But ECC can be part of a system design that includes active monitoring and response. I’d expect that system design to also include measurement of ECC events under ordinary conditions, regular re-measurement, and funding for an analysis of the changes and explanation of the difference—just like you’d find in safety engineering in a coal plant, an MRI machine, any sort of engineering that has a professional scientist or engineer on site supervising all operations.
Of course, you’ll also find a tendency there towards specified hardware. They bend or break it to use COTS x86 machines, but—as I think I heard from a comment here last week—nearly nobody ever specified wanting AMT in the initial design, so it’s pretty weird that we’re all buying and deploying it.