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Ouch. Before reading this article I was seriously considering deploying a signing service as a HaLVM (Haskell) Xen PV unikernel running on EC2. The service woul
by runeks 10y ago
Ouch. Before reading this article I was seriously considering deploying a signing service as a HaLVM (Haskell) Xen PV unikernel running on EC2. The service would receive its private key after startup, such that the key never touches disk. Now I'm a lot less inclined to pretend that the Xen interface actually protects me...
- ploxiln 10y agoXen has had page-table and interrupt vector related security vulnerabilities. But I don't think EC2 would use non-ECC RAM, so I don't think it's vulnerable to this "rowhammer" technique. (I also don't think EC2 would do cross-VM page deduplication, another necessary condition.)
- willvarfar 10y agoPerhaps we need more certainty than just "think"? That AWS don't boast that they are not susceptible to this suggests that perhaps at least some of their setup is?
- Rezo 10y agoThe EC2 FAQ [0] states: "In our experience, ECC memory is necessary for server infrastructure, and all the hardware underlying Amazon EC2 uses ECC memory." While ECC does apparently not completely mitigate Rowhammer, it helps. [0] https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/faqs/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/faqs/
- mseri 10y agoAfaik xen does not use memory deduplication. KVM aside, one should be worried about things running inside a linux host/vm, like containers. Maybe I am missing something