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

From: Mark Rutland
Date: Fri Oct 28 2016 - 05:53:39 EST


On Fri, Oct 28, 2016 at 11:35:47AM +0200, Ingo Molnar wrote:
>
> * 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.

With the proposed approach, they could split across multiple CPUs
instead, no?

... or was that covered in a prior thread?

Thanks,
Mark.