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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/


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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 18 2018, @06:05PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 18 2018, @06:05PM (#681305)

    You / we all, were just trolled by a spam bot. There's math in that post.
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    The owners of these bots are priming the pumps to jokey for a better position when they launch, if they haven't launched already.

    Try to vote down offtopic commentary wherever you see it, especially when there is literally no connection to the subject matter being discussed. It would be helpful if the mods of sites like this could censor those out of the HTML completely when they detect a crawler or when a certain percentage of mods have down voted a comment as spam.

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  • (Score: 1, Spam) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday May 18 2018, @09:37PM (1 child)

    Two gold crowns came off the rearmost molars on the bottom left of my mouth. By the time I came up with the cost of having them recemented the teeth had shifted so the original crowns didn't fit.

    Eventually I was given no choice but to have them pulled. While painful really it is bearable. What disturbed me the most was the sound my roots made as my dentist tore them free.

    While not a cosmetic problem I am dismayed that I cannot chew on the left side of my mouth. So once I earn my first billion as a result of - overnight - turning soggy jobs into a bestiality pr0n site, I will get implants.

    --
    Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
    • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 19 2018, @10:08AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 19 2018, @10:08AM (#681558)

      So once I earn my first billion as a result of - overnight - turning soggy jobs into a bestiality pr0n site, I will get implants.

      MDC, always thinking ahead.