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I believe the suggestion was that NASA could update the main computer with their own 'untrusted' to exploit the flaw in the power system, side stepping their ow

by petee 9y ago

I believe the suggestion was that NASA could update the main computer with their own 'untrusted' to exploit the flaw in the power system, side stepping their own protections. But as mentioned below in other comments, these vulns are likely not present on this hardware

simias 9y ago
That doesn't make sense to me, aren't we talking about two different pieces of hardware talking together? If they could reflash the "display computer" then the problem would be solved if I understand correctly. Even if it's really two "applications" running on the same CPU I don't see how spectre/meltdown would help since it's all about getting read-only access to "forbidden" memory. Clearly they don't need that (they know full well what's in memory), they want to be able to modify it. In such a situation RowHammer might be used to modify the state of an other program sharing the same RAM in the right conditions but if there's one piece of hardware I expect to be hardened against spurious bitflips it's a space probe. We're talking about radiation-hardened ECC-protected RAM after all.