3 ms·

How does encryption help? When you only need to achieve a 1-bit change it doesn't matter much if the exact change isn't predictable.

• duskwuff 6y ago
  With any sort of decent encryption, flipping a bit will corrupt the entire cache line unpredictably. That's still bad, of course, but it's much less likely to be exploitable.
  • nullc 6y ago
    Doesn't really much help if all the attack is needs to do is flip a flag or replace a value with one that evaluates to true (e.g. anything except 0). Sure, any particular exploit may be less likely to work, but once you can hammer memory 3/4 of the code running on the system turns into a potential exploit vector. :)
    • duskwuff 6y ago
      The problem is collateral damage. It's rare that writing garbage to an entire 64-byte (not bit!) cache line will go unnoticed -- in most applications, chances are good that there'll be at least one pointer in there that'll be corrupted.