[Cryptography] "Flip Feng Shui: Hammering a Needle in the Software Stack"

Natanael natanael.l at gmail.com
Sat Sep 3 05:05:58 EDT 2016


Den 3 sep. 2016 01:01 skrev "Bart Preneel" <bart.preneel at esat.kuleuven.be>:
>
> If you can target executable code (and I see why not, it's all the
> same to KSM), it is very clear that there cannot be a software-only
> defense.  (The authors try to frame this as a software problem which
> needs fixes in GnuPG etc.)
>
> Comment:
>
> Rowhammer can indeed target executable code, but corrupting a public key
is more attractive for an attacker:
> - Rowhammer can only flip a bit in a certain memory region but not in a
specific memory location. Flipping any bit of a public key will lead
> to compromise, which is not the case for code. - Finding out which bits
are useful to flip in executable code typically requires manual work
through reverse engineering (and this work has to be repeated for every
binary).
>
> While protecting public keys with error detection codes is only a partial
> solution, it is an easy thing to do that raises the barrier. On the other
hand, protecting the complete code brings a large overhead.

I saw this linked on Hacker News yesterday;

https://github.com/mame/radiation-hardened-quine

Flip ANY bit, the code still behaves exact the same.
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