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[–] chakan2 [S] 0 points 14 points (+14|-0) ago 

The fun stuff all happens on the 2nd page...if you're too lazy to click through, this is the awesome sauce.

Rowhammer takes advantage of a design defect in dynamic random-access memory, or DRAM, chips, which provide the high-speed data storage for a computer’s CPU. The most common DRAM standard today is called DDR3, ubiquitous on laptops, workstations, servers, phones, and tablets. A single DRAM chip contains billions of electrical capacitors, each of which stores a single bit. The sheer density of capacitors on these memory chips, however, causes a problem. By “hammering” a row of bits repeatedly, constantly changing their values, an attacker can sometimes induce an electrical interference in which capacitors in a different, adjacent row are mistakenly flipped. If the attacker can sufficiently control what’s in that adjacent row, then the attacker can manipulate your computer without authorization. Researchers at Google’s Project Zero were able to gain kernel privileges via Rowhammer and thus full read-write access to a computer’s memory.