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Is ECC more secure than regular consumer grade memory?
by randomchars 14y ago
Is ECC more secure than regular consumer grade memory?
- rdl 14y agoMore "secure" from single bit errors, but not for recovery -- kind of the opposite goal. The big difference is DRAM (mostly the same, including DDR3) vs. SRAM (of several types -- relevant due to use in HSMs, cpu cache, etc.). DRAM has been getting worse/longer duration as it becomes lower power, so arguably DDR3 (being relatively new) would be worse than 1985 RAM. CPU registers are the safest place against this attack (hence stuff like TRESOR where AES keys are held in CPU registers), but are by necessity limited (especially on x86; SPARC was better, and some of the new extensions to x86 help (SSE, etc.) Most of this has been mitigated to some extent by periodic inversion of sensitive strings in main memory (keys, usually) -- this has been implemented in ~all crypto libraries. SRAM's huge advantage is you can clear it faster than DRAM, but that doesn't help if you can somehow prevent the clearing from happening.