Blacksmith – Rowhammer bit flips on all DRAM devices today despite mitigations

Re:Blacksmith – Rowhammer bit flips on all DRAM devices toda... by froh on Monday November 15, 2021 @01:25PM (#29230678)

IBM Z series silicon (z architecture and it's predecessors s390,...) Is designed with multi tenancy in mind from the get go. Finding a way to escape virtualization let alone partitioning to access confidential competitor data was a no go.

And indeed to my understanding spectre, meltdown, rowhammer and similar attacks are not an issue there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z/Architecture

I wonder when more features from the mainframe cross pollinate Intel amd arm CPU architectures.

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Re:Blacksmith – Rowhammer bit flips on all DRAM devices toda... by monocasa on Monday November 15, 2021 @01:57PM (#29231122)

Z Series is very much susceptible to meltdown, spectre, and rowhammer. IBM says that it should be fine because Spectre et al need to be running untrusted workloads to work, but they haven't updated their advisories since NetSpectre. : /

A lot of the talk of mainframe levels of security is specious at best.

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Re:Blacksmith – Rowhammer bit flips on all DRAM devices toda... by froh on Monday November 15, 2021 @02:21PM (#29231422)

Wow. Your right, for spectre patches were needed on system z.

https://www.suse.com/de-de/support/kb/doc/?id=000019105

Meltdown didn't affect z nor amd.

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Re:Blacksmith – Rowhammer bit flips on all DRAM devices toda... by monocasa on Monday November 15, 2021 @02:29PM (#29231549)

Series Z and POWER up to and including POWER9 are susceptible to meltdown as well.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/meltdown-spectre-ibm-preps-fir...

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Re:Blacksmith – Rowhammer bit flips on all DRAM devices toda... by froh on Tuesday November 16, 2021 @12:42AM (#29237296)

Ok. debian is even more explicit than suse above regarding "no meltdown on Z":

https://wiki.debian.org/DebianSecurity/SpectreMeltdown#Syste...

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Re:Blacksmith – Rowhammer bit flips on all DRAM devices toda... by classichasclass on Monday November 15, 2021 @03:56PM (#29232608)

But, not 7400 G4 and earlier.

https://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2018/01/actual-field-testing...

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Re:Blacksmith – Rowhammer bit flips on all DRAM devices toda... by monocasa on Monday November 15, 2021 @04:45PM (#29233202)

Which aren't POWER cores. POWER is an IBM trademark; the 7400 is a Motorola PowerPC core.

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Re:Blacksmith – Rowhammer bit flips on all DRAM devices toda... by classichasclass on Monday November 15, 2021 @04:47PM (#29233218)

A fair point, though early POWER cores probably aren't for the same reasons these aren't (can't speculate through indirect branches using SPRs), and IBM was involved in the development of both.

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