We used to think of computer security troubles as being pretty much exclusively software problems. Things have changed. In 2014, Carnegie Mellon University students found that, in theory, just by reading and closing data stored on one row of memory cells over and over again at high speeds, you could alter data stored in nearby memory rows. Then, in 2015, Google Project Zero researchers showed not just one, but two ways this “rowhammer” attack could gain read-write access to a laptop’s memory.

Rowhammer memory attacks close in on the real world More>