Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by hathawsh 3093 days ago
OTOH, a rowhammer attack on ECC memory will likely flip 1 bit before it flips 2, making attacks theoretically detectable. Without ECC, there's no clear way to detect an attack.
1 comments

I'd assume that parity is checked on access, which may give enough time to flip more than one bit before it's detected.
ECC memory controller performs memory scrubbing periodically, in the background, during which it checks parity and corrects any bitflips. Otherwise ECC would not work nearly as well as it does.
Parity isn't checked during every single row refresh?
AFAIK, row refresh is done within each memory chip, while the ECC bits are normally on a separate chip (for instance, where a non-ECC module has 8 chips, an ECC modules has 9 chips), so ECC scrubbing has to be done in the memory controller.