Hacker News Reader

Not necessary, see the original paper.

For example, SECDED (single error-correction, double error- detection) can correct only a single-bit error within a 64-bit word. If a word contains two victims, however, SECDED cannot correct the resulting double-bit error. And for three or more victims, SECDED cannot even detect the multi-bit er- ror, leading to silent data corruption.

Edit: link http://users.ece.cmu.edu/~yoonguk/papers/kim-isca14.pdf

View on HN

Technically, SECDED cannot reliably detect errors involving more then 3 bits since they might generate a valid code, they might not however and in that case they might be detected as single or double bit error or possible something else.

Also the typical reaction to an uncorrectable ECC error is to halt the system with a NMI.

Yeah, ECC is going to make exploiting this reliably a lot harder - you'd need to flip three or more bits in the right combination, without first hitting a combination of bits that'd be detected as an uncorrectable error. Google's report suggests they haven't even been able to cause uncorrectable two-bit errors yet, let alone undetectable three-bit ones.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com