How Big a Deal is this Really?
This is an attack that ahould not be possible in theory; it is only because real-life electronic devices fall short of the ideal that accessing one memory location can influence a different memory location.
Also, it is highly dependent on the layout of memory. The bit you're allowed to touch has to be located correctly relative to the bit you want to alter. On a modern system, with who knows what processes running, that is a lot easier said than done. SSDs are continuously remapping sectors for the purpose of eveninh out wear and tear, and a bunch of repeated writes to the same logical location might end up spread across different physical locations. And that's without mentioning different memory allocation strategies designed to mitigate against attacks.
Memory that is less vulnerable to misreads generally -- which everybody agrees is A Good Thing -- is bound to be less vulnerable to deliberate attempts to induce misreads. So newer systems than tested, running a random mix of software, will be harder to attack.
So I'm not sure we have much to worry about just yet.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
