6 ms·
In other words, blame Intel for trying to pass off ECC as a "Enterprise Feature" instead of the basic necessity that it is.
by notriddle 5y ago
In other words, blame Intel for trying to pass off ECC as a "Enterprise Feature" instead of the basic necessity that it is.
- hypertele-Xii 5y agoECC is vulnerable to Rowhammer.
- nwah1 5y agoEqually vulnerable?
- notriddle 5y agoI saw this article linked later. https://www.vusec.net/projects/eccploit/ https://www.vusec.net/projects/eccploit/ It's interesting! It seems fixable, based on information later on in the article ("Can I get DDR3 DIMMs that are Rowhammer-free?"), and ECC only seems to be part of a solution, and not a complete solution. But you're still right, and I was still wrong: ECC alone isn't good enough.
- nullc 5y agoMuch less so.
- r00fus 5y agoThe same way that masks don't prevent COVID.
- th0ma5 5y agoRight in statistically mostly it does / they do.
- kortilla 5y agoNo, statistically it’s almost useless to prevent yourself from getting COVID. It’s mainly about reducing your ability to spread it. That’s why people get mad when you don’t wear a mask even if you “don’t care about getting covid”.
- th0ma5 5y agoYes that was a prominent theory at one time and helped a lot of the public adopt masks but it is actually both https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/11/11/933903848/wear-masks-to-protect-yourself-from-the-coronavirus-not-only-others-cdc-stresses https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/11/11/9339038...
- josh2600 5y agoI mean the punchline is: if you heat something up enough then you can get electrons to wiggle. At some level of cell wall thickness, the cost/time/annoyance of triggering a rowhammer exceeds the value of the attack, and other methods become cheaper or more practical. Ultimately, nothing that an attacker has physical access to can be completely secured, we can only raise the cost in terms of time and money to attempt to breach the system. Even a system with tamper-destructive enclosures have seen attacks (it's just more expensive and difficult than other attacks). In short, the more annoying/expensive you can make it to attack your system, the smaller the set of attackers becomes.
- tooltower 5y agoWe are not talking about physical attacks. Neither are we talking about attacks based purely on heating up the DRAM chips. The topic here is a remote attacker who can target specific words or bits to be flipped.
- josh2600 5y agoWhen bits are flipped in a row hammer attack, what is happening to the dram? Most people would argue the energetic potential is increasing causing a failure of the boundary between cells...
- dahfizz 5y agoRow hammer is already super impractical. ECC does make the exploit harder.
- creato 5y agoDRAM manufacturers continue (knowingly at this point) to manufacture faulty products, and we should blame Intel?
- gugagore 5y agoI am not familiar with DRAM spec sheets, but are manufacturers specifying that there will be zero errors? Without a specification that says so, I don't think it's necessarily the fault of the manufacturer if they cannot build perfect RAM! Suppose someone builds a car with one these computers in a safety-critical role, and then someone gets injured because of an error that "originated" with the RAM.
- rini17 5y agoThey specify timing and when it is followed, RAM should work without fault. But if there are corner cases like this, they should be added to specs. Most likely it would require memory controller to remember last addresses and insert delays if rowhammer attempt is detected. And/or make CPU microoperation scheduler avoid it. No idea how expensive would that be, surely nontrivial.
- kevingadd 5y agoThere are already measures like that where the memory controller attempts to identify "victim rows" and refresh them, but attacks can fool the victim row detection and succeed anyway.
- rocqua 5y agoIf my car's spec doesn't say "the wheels stay on" and then the wheels fall off, the car is still defective.
- userbinator 5y agoThe true safety-critical stuff is far from ordinary and would never use commodity DRAM.
- notriddle 5y ago
- staticassertion 5y agoAgreed. Rowhammer is just one more example of this, but it's frustrating that ECC is not widely deployed.
- vbezhenar 5y agoDo you think many Ryzen PCs use ECC? I doubt that. It's accepted truth among gamers and power users, that ECC is waste of budget. I don't share this position, but if you'd ask on some computer forums, that's what you'll hear. If ECC would be enabled on all Intel CPUs, nothing fundamentally would change, most users would prefer to save 10% on their RAM.
- GekkePrutser 5y agoI don't use it on mine, but my Ryzen PC is my gaming box.. Where the impact from such things is very limited. But ECC RAM is a lot more than 10% more expensive. This is part of the problem. Intel pushes it into a high-end niche which puts it in a much more expensive category, and it also loses economy of scale.
- ghoward 5y agoI use it on my Ryzen PC, but I am also running ZFS, and I'm a little paranoid about using my data. This is one anecdote, though, so it's probably not useful. But people using ECC on Ryzen do exist.
- staticassertion 5y agoThe price of ECC is artificially inflated because it's not available to consumers.
- Laforet 5y agoAt minimum ECC will cost you an extra 12.5% for the extra bit of RAM. That part is not inflated.
- staticassertion 5y agoYeah I wasn't trying to imply it would cost nothing to add ECC.
- Dylan16807 5y ago> It's accepted truth among gamers and power users, that ECC is waste of budget. A waste of budget at what price? Are they actually looking at $80 of ram becoming $90, or are they looking at it becoming $160 and slower? Which is about what I see when I go check newegg. I don't think you can extrapolate current decisions to a world where adding ECC is 12% of the RAM budget and 1-2% of the total budget.