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Giant bug eats DDR4

by on21 March 2016


Rowhammer not just for DDR3

DDR4 was supposed to be a lot more secure than other DDR3 which was vulnerable to an exploit called Rowhammer.  But it turns out that DDR4 might also be vulnerable afterall.

A paper with the catchy title "How Rowhammer Could Be Used to Exploit Weaknesses in Computer Hardware" showed many of the DIMMs were vulnerable to a phenomenon known as "bitflipping," in which 0s were converted to 1s and vice versa. The report was published by Third I/O, an Austin, Texas-based provider of high-speed bandwidth and super computing technologies..

"Based on the analysis by Third I/O, we believe that this problem is significantly worse than what is being reported. And it is still visible on some DDR4 memory modules."

At the moment there is no immediate danger of Rowhammer being exploited maliciously to hijack the security of computers that use the vulnerable memory chips. But the report sends a chilling warning to Samsung, Micron, and other DDR manufacturers. Samsung, declared its DDR4 product line to be "Rowhammer free" because of technology it calls TRR, or targeted row refresh.Micron, meanwhile, has also praised the benefits of TRR in its DDR4 products.

The researchers tested these claims and ofund that eight out of 12 varieties of DDR4 chips could be bitflipped only DIMMs from G.Skill were able to withstand the tests.

"Although the sample size of memory we tested was very small, we can definitively say that Rowhammer bit flips are most certainly reproducible on DDR4," the authors wrote.

 

Last modified on 21 March 2016
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