I saw this article linked later. https://www.vusec.net/projects/eccploit/

It's interesting! It seems fixable, based on information later on in the article ("Can I get DDR3 DIMMs that are Rowhammer-free?"), and ECC only seems to be part of a solution, and not a complete solution.

But you're still right, and I was still wrong: ECC alone isn't good enough.

I mean the punchline is: if you heat something up enough then you can get electrons to wiggle. At some level of cell wall thickness, the cost/time/annoyance of triggering a rowhammer exceeds the value of the attack, and other methods become cheaper or more practical.

Ultimately, nothing that an attacker has physical access to can be completely secured, we can only raise the cost in terms of time and money to attempt to breach the system. Even a system with tamper-destructive enclosures have seen attacks (it's just more expensive and difficult than other attacks).

In short, the more annoying/expensive you can make it to attack your system, the smaller the set of attackers becomes.

We are not talking about physical attacks. Neither are we talking about attacks based purely on heating up the DRAM chips. The topic here is a remote attacker who can target specific words or bits to be flipped.

When bits are flipped in a row hammer attack, what is happening to the dram? Most people would argue the energetic potential is increasing causing a failure of the boundary between cells...

Much less so.

Row hammer is already super impractical. ECC does make the exploit harder.

Equally vulnerable?

The same way that masks don't prevent COVID.

Right in statistically mostly it does / they do.

No, statistically it’s almost useless to prevent yourself from getting COVID. It’s mainly about reducing your ability to spread it.

That’s why people get mad when you don’t wear a mask even if you “don’t care about getting covid”.

Yes that was a prominent theory at one time and helped a lot of the public adopt masks but it is actually both https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/11/11/9339038...