----- Forwarded message from Jerry Leichter <[email protected]> -----

Date: Thu, 1 Sep 2016 11:33:16 -0400
From: Jerry Leichter <[email protected]>
To: Cryptography List <[email protected]>
Subject: [Cryptography] "Flip Feng Shui: Hammering a Needle in the Software 
Stack"
X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.3124)

"We introduce Flip Feng Shui (FFS), a new exploitation vector which allows an 
attacker to induce bit flips over arbitrary physical memory in a fully 
controlled way. FFS relies on hardware bugs to induce bit flips over memory and 
on the ability to surgically control the physical memory layout to corrupt 
attacker-targeted data anywhere in the software stack.... Memory deduplication 
allows an attacker to reverse-map any physical page into a virtual page she 
owns as long as the page’s contents are known. Rowhammer, in turn, allows an 
attacker to flip bits in controlled (initially unknown) locations in the target 
page.

We show FFS is extremely powerful: a malicious VM in a practical cloud setting 
can gain unauthorized access to a co-hosted victim VM running OpenSSH. Using 
FFS, we exemplify end-to-end attacks breaking OpenSSH public-key 
authentication, and forging GPG signatures from trusted keys, thereby 
compromising the Ubuntu/Debian update mechanism."

https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/usenixsecurity16/sec16_paper_razavi.pdf

                                                        -- Jerry

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----- End forwarded message -----

Does Rowhammer work in clouds? According to the popular story it
affected only laptops.

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