Re:Did Windows 10 slow down with each feature update?
by josephg on Tuesday June 22, 2021 @07:49AM
(#27590494)
The term “Random memory access” is a horribly confusing misnomer from before I was born. It’s used as a contrast with sequential memory access, to mean memory can be accessed in any arbitrary order.
My understanding is that these vulnerabilities allow reading the memory at arbitrary mapped pointers, from the perspective of the CPU, in kernel or user space. So you could use the kernel’s data structures to figure out what other programs are mapped, and where, and go read their memory.
But—and please tell me if I’m just totally wrong about this—my understanding was they can read random memory, right? The attacker can’t control what they get.
Out of the gigabytes of memory on a system, I’d expect only a handful of bytes to be actually valuable, and only then if certain combinations can be retrieved together.