Cloud native EDA tools & pre-optimized hardware platforms
This morning Google Project Zero – the same team that discovered the Heartbleed bug – published this blog entry,
The blog entry is very detailed so here’s a short summary:
Google has tried their technique on 29 machines and found that they could initiate bit flips on 15 of them with some software utilities they wrote to exploit row hammering.
Google may have already to help prevent this issue
What happens next? Well, at a minimum, we’ll probably all need browser and operating system patches to prevent row hammering exploits. It may be possible to program the BIOS in your system to refresh the DRAM more often which could help to reduce the probability that row hammering would work on your system (at the cost of more power usage and lower performance though).
Looking forward to DDR4, Row Hammering may be a thing of the past. Samsung that their DDR4 memory would not be susceptible to Row Hammering because they implement Targeted Row Refresh (TRR) – the cure to Row Hammering – inside of their devices: and , “Micron’s DDR4 devices automatically perform TRR mode in the background.” There’s some evidence that next-generation CPUs will either not be capable of issuing row hammering data patterns, or may mitigate them with TRR, or both.
As always, browse safely and keep your software up to date!