Comment by defrost | Hacker News Reader

Comment by defrost | Hacker News Reader

This wikipedia article must surely be inaccurate:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Row_hammer

    The initial research into the row hammer effect, published in June 2014, described the nature of disturbance errors and indicated the potential for constructing an attack, but did not provide any examples of a working security exploit. [1]

[1] (June 24, 2014). "Flipping Bits in Memory Without Accessing Them: An Experimental Study of DRAM Disturbance Errors"

By my recollection there was a discussion of rowhammer and making it work on a (original) Freenode channel circa 2010 (or earlier) in response to a related thread on a reddit security hacking subreddit.

ie: it was being discussed in public channels some four years prior to a paper cited as "initial research".

Addendum: Mind you, lots of things get kicked about and implemented before actual papers appear on them for the first time in public.

Well, that quote from Wikipedia says the published paper didn't include a working exploit. That might be true even if a working exploit was available after the paper was written and submitted but before it was published. (I don't know if this is the case here, but this sort of thing is common in scientific publishing.)

To clarify:

    Mind you, lots of things get kicked about and implemented before actual papers appear on them for the first time in public.

I was thinking of many examples I know where a technique is developed and used in industry (mineral exploration | remote imaging | secret spook stuff) and much later (five years or more) gets a first mention in acedemia .. where they may or may not get a robust working version happening .. just a rickety proof of concept.

The possibility of flipping bits in DRAM in a Rowhammer like fashion, was known in the DRAM industry since at least the 1990s (sorry, no reference handy), and Rowhammer-like access was used in DRAM quality testing.

As silicon density increased, the issue became more urgent.

That matches my recollection- I started in broad STEM at university in the 1980s and as chip sizes were pushed smaller and denser there was always thought given to signal bleed | harmonics from too many lines too close together.

I suspect "observed in fabrication lab | not disclosed" dates back some years before the paper .. once observed there's always a path to exploitation - but why would anyone broadcast that?

By the time it was chit chat on IRC the general feeling was that some TLA has a working exploit. (obviously unpublished).

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