Re: rowhammer protection [was Re: Getting interrupt every million cache misses]

From: Ingo Molnar
Date: Fri Oct 28 2016 - 05:35:54 EST



* Vegard Nossum <vegard.nossum@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Would it make sense to sample the counter on context switch, do some
> accounting on a per-task cache miss counter, and slow down just the
> single task(s) with a too high cache miss rate? That way there's no
> global slowdown (which I assume would be the case here). The task's
> slice of CPU would have to be taken into account because otherwise you
> could have multiple cooperating tasks that each escape the limit but
> taken together go above it.

Attackers could work this around by splitting the rowhammer workload between
multiple threads/processes.

I.e. the problem is that the risk may come from any 'unprivileged user-space
code', where the rowhammer workload might be spread over multiple threads,
processes or even users.

Thanks,

Ingo