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posted by janrinok on Thursday September 01 2016, @08:39PM   Printer-friendly
from the you're-not-meant-to-do-that dept.

A very anonymous AC submits the following:

http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/08/new-attack-steals-private-crypto-keys-by-corrupting-data-in-computer-memory/

The research team, which also included a member from Belgium's Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, went on to show how an attacker VM can use Flip Feng Shui to compromise RSA cryptography keys stored on another VM hosted in the same cloud environment. In one experiment, the attacker VM compromised the key used to authenticate secure shell access, a feat that allowed the VM to gain unauthorized access to the target. In a separate experiment, the attacker VM compromised the GPG key used by developers of the Ubuntu operating system to verify the authenticity of updates. With the compromised GPG key, the attacker VM was able to force the target to download and install a malicious update.

"Virtual Inception" could be a good name for this specific use of "Flip Feng Shui" :).

I wonder how well ECC protects from such attacks: http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/03/once-thought-safe-ddr4-memory-shown-to-be-vulnerable-to-rowhammer/


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Hyperturtle on Friday September 02 2016, @05:42PM

    by Hyperturtle (2824) on Friday September 02 2016, @05:42PM (#396721)

    To me, this is the real news: That the vulnerability exists in server architecture because ofa cost based decision to keep the prices lower by using non-server RAM, opening the doors to exploits that require...server RAM.

    That businesses make decisions on a few pennies, such as that between what different hosting providers may charge, and not based on the "what type of hardware is my stuff actually getting hosted on...?" That too is news, but not surprising news.

    This makes me wonder what else is not using ECC memory and holding all of our personal data.

    Heck I still use ECC/parity RAM for my servers at home -- and even waited for sales to upgrade some of the servers as far as I could afford to get them to go, rather th an fill them with cheap memory -- because I fear more for the safety and less chances of crashing and data corruption -- than I otherwise could stuff them with.

    Those arguments that parity memory is slower... I don't really notice this. And it sure would take longer to recover from any data loss. Yeah I make backups, but I also would have to take time to figure out what went wrong and what has to be restored, and probably a lot of time wasted in actually determining there was corruption that requires a restoration -- as opposed to some glitch to troubleshoot.

    I believe businesses should not be using non-ECC RAM in their servers, but that's high and mighty for me to say. I have heard many times RAM is so high of quality now, who needs ECC RAM -- and have heard that argument going back years and years, and I hear it when talking with a new person or even another generation of IT geeks arguing that it is in their best interests to be cheap. That's fine -- just don't impact me with it. I'll pay the few extra bucks so that it's one less thing to worry about. I really don't know how many times ECC has protected me from issues, or when to blame mysterious problems on non-ECC or non-parity memory. I do know of a few occasions where cheap memory caused issues; I don't remember any expensive modules causing issues unless they completely failed.

    But... even if I am unsure of just how much better my data integrity is with ECC RAM, now that we know it can prevent various hacking attacks--this doesnt even seem like an argument anymore. Getting hacked can be expensive. I hope people drop the pretense that server memory has to be cheap because "insert next big thing here". ECC memory can be cheap--when you consider the costs of getting 0wn3d, it's much cheaper than the alternative. Now that isn't a theoretical... And besides. Why protect through layers of software security that can have holes itself, via what you can *prevent* via hardware?

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  • (Score: 2) by Fnord666 on Sunday September 04 2016, @04:28AM

    by Fnord666 (652) on Sunday September 04 2016, @04:28AM (#397266) Homepage
    One of the linked articles [arstechnica.com] says that Rowhammer works well on DIMM3 ECC memory.

    The researchers were also able to flip the bits inside DDR3 DIMMs installed on an enterprise-grade server. The tests succeeded even though all of the DDR3 modules included a protection known as ECC, short for error-correction code, that's supposed to make them more resistant to Rowhammer