New cloud attack takes full control of virtual machines with little effort
The rowhammer "attack" is successful only because the hardware is just plain <i>broken</i>, and I consider it in the same category as things like a CPU which will calculate 1+1=3 if the computation of 1+1 is done enough times --- nothing software should even try to fix, because the problem is at a lower level. The solution is to demand that the hardware manufacturers make memory which actually works like memory should; and it should be possible, since apparently previous generations of RAM don't have this problem at all. In the early 90s Intel recalled and replaced, free of charge, CPUs which didn't divide correctly. Perhaps the memory manufacturers today should do the same for rowhammer-affected modules and chips.<p>Memory errors are particularly disturbing because they are often highly dependent on data and access patterns, and can be <i>extremely</i> difficult to pinpoint without special testing tools. I've personally experienced a situation where a system which otherwise appears to work perfectly well would <i>always</i> corrupt one specific bit of a file when extracting one particular archive.<p>As a testing tool, MemTest86+ has always worked well for me, and the newer versions can detect rowhammer, although there is this interesting discussion about whether it is actually a problem (to which I say a resounding <i>YES!!!</i>) or if there's some sort of cover-up by the memory industry:<p><a href="http://www.passmark.com/forum/memtest86/5903-rowhammer-problem-not-found-by-memtest86-6-3-0" rel="nofollow">http://www.passmark.com/forum/memtest86/5903-rowhammer-probl...</a><p><a href="http://www.passmark.com/forum/memtest86/5475-memtest86-v6-2-0-released-8-sept-2015" rel="nofollow">http://www.passmark.com/forum/memtest86/5475-memtest86-v6-2-...</a><p>Run it on your hardware and if it fails, I think you should definitely complain and get it fixed.