Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by martyb on Friday May 18 2018, @12:32PM   Printer-friendly
from the endorsed-by-Thor dept.

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow3941

Five academics from the Vrije University in Amsterdam and one from the University of Cyprus have discovered a way for launching Rowhammer attacks via network packets and network cards.

Their discovery makes Rowhammer attacks easier and much more convenient to launch, as an attacker only needs to bombard a victim's network card with specially-crafted packets.

This is much simpler than previous Rowhammer attacks that required that the attacker infected the victim with malware or tricked victims into accessing malicious websites, where they'd load the Rowhammer attack code hidden inside the site's JavaScript.

Researchers named their new Rowhammer attack method Throwhammer, which they've detailed today in a research paper entitled "Throwhammer: Rowhammer Attacks over the Network and Defenses."

[...] Researchers say that only RDMA-enabled network cards are vulnerable.

RDMA stands for Remote Direct Memory Access, a technology that exposes a computer's memory directly over a network without involving the CPU and the machine's OS, hence being able to process more packets than older network cards.

[...] "Modern NICs are able to transfer large amounts of network traffic to remote memory. In our experimental setup, we observed bit flips when accessing memory 560,000 times in 64 ms, which translates to 9 million accesses per second," researchers wrote in the Throwhammer paper.

"Even regular 10 Gbps Ethernet cards can easily send 9 million packets per second to a remote host that end up being stored on the host’s memory," researchers said, pointing out that an attacker doesn't necessarily need a fast network connection to carry out the attack, but only the presence of an RDMA-enabled network card.

For the experimental part of their paper, researchers say they were able to cause bit flips in a remote Memcached server just by using network packets (the Throwhammer attack) and without needing any user actions (as was required with the classical Rowhammer).

Source: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/researchers-come-up-with-a-way-to-launch-rowhammer-attacks-via-network-packets/


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by fritsd on Friday May 18 2018, @03:36PM

    by fritsd (4586) on Friday May 18 2018, @03:36PM (#681206) Journal

    I think pp means: "just buy a fucking normal network card without special RDMA Goatse properties that only make sense for HPC clusters that are airgapped from the Internet"

    But, I could be wrong interpreting the teeth analogy. Who is Gerd, by the way??

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2