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by reliabilityguy 818 days ago
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1 comments

It will detect (by crashing) enough to make exploitation impractical. That is the key point.
I would say that 60% success per trial is a good chance.
In the process of generating one triple flip, many, many, many, many, many single and double flips will occur and will be caught. That is why ECC is still an effective defense. Attackers don't just get to go straight to their end game.
You can cause any amount of single and double flip without worry. It's not a defence as the attacker can retry till ECC labels it as uncorrectable. AFAIK there is no cost in retrying.
That's true, but none of it is silent. Corrected errors get reported and it will be obvious that something is going wrong to anyone who's paying attention.
Reported where? There is no reporting in Ryzen CPUs.
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The ECCploit paper has extensive discussion of all the ways their work is detected, and how they even use detection to probe the correction structure. This is not a silent attack. This is a proof that ECC is a penetrable defense. Which we all know! The question is how difficult it is and how stealthily it can be done.

But regardless, ECC still sounds the alarm when it's being attacked. If no one listens, there's not much ECC can do about that.

That's true for encryption too.