<story><title>RAMBleed Attack – Reading Bits in Memory Without Accessing Them</title><url>https://rambleed.com/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>rsweeney21</author><text>Shortly after I joined Microsoft in 2004, all new feature work on Windows Longhorn (Vista) was halted. There had been yet another high profile computer virus on Windows XP caused by a buffer overflow. It was an all-hands-on-deck type moment. Everyone spent weeks adding SAL (source-code annotation language) annotations to the entire Windows code base. SAL annotations enabled automated source code analysis to identify potential buffer overflow bugs and other common security vulnerabilities. Once annotated, we identified and fixed who knows how many hundreds of security vulnerabilities in Windows.&lt;p&gt;This colossal security update was released as Windows XP Service Pack 2. This is the beauty of software.&lt;p&gt;Hardware vulnerabilities scare me. There are millions of Intel CPUs and DRAM modules installed in data centers and PCs around the world. When we find vulnerabilities in &lt;i&gt;hardware&lt;/i&gt; how are we supposed to fix them?&lt;p&gt;The past few years have been really scary for me as a software engineer. I keep thinking that the next one will pop the software bubble.</text></comment>
<story><title>RAMBleed Attack – Reading Bits in Memory Without Accessing Them</title><url>https://rambleed.com/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>musicale</author><text>Whenever you have sharing, you usually have side channels. We&amp;#x27;re going to see more and more of this until we have much better hardware isolation.&lt;p&gt;This is a kind of obvious variant of Rowhammer, which hasn&amp;#x27;t generally been fixed AFAIK.&lt;p&gt;Hardware in the late 2010s seems a bit like Windows in the late 1990s - a house of cards waiting to collapse, but the dominant vendors know that very few customers are willing to pay more for security and reliability vs. performance&amp;#x2F;features&amp;#x2F;new and shiny.&lt;p&gt;(So if we&amp;#x27;re lucky then we&amp;#x27;ll end up with a &amp;quot;more secure&amp;quot; version of hardware that is analogous to... Windows Vista.)</text></comment>