Howard Chu (hyc.delete@this.symas.com) on December 1, 2018 12:52 pm wrote:
>
> What security threats are you thinking of? I believe with non-volatility and
> non-destructive reads, MRAM is immune to rowhammer-style attacks. (But I don't
> have any references that claim to have tested or verified this.)
>




Any kind of non-volatile RAM replacement cannot have acceptable security unless the processor has memory encryption, like AMD Zen has now and some future Intel processors will also have.


Nevertheless, unlike for a SSD, where I can choose whatever encryption algorithm and key management system I want, I do not have any control over AMD SME.

Maybe the AMD implementation of memory encryption is secure (although there have already been reports of some problems), but I cannot verify that, so I would never trust it. I trust Intel even less than AMD.


I might accept to use non-volatile DIMMs in some server that I believe to be reasonably physically secure, but I will certainly never accept non-volatile RAM in a laptop, which can be easily stolen.



However, having grown up in a country where everybody was under surveillance from the secret police, whose only purpose was to ensure that nobody will be able to overthrow the government composed of thieves and murderers, I am very aware of the fact that while my servers might be protected from ordinary thieves, they cannot be protected from the government, which I do not trust at all even today, so I will never use non-volatile DIMMs even in servers, regardless of what speed advantages they might have.


What is sad is that during the last 20 years all the English-speaking countries and also the European Union have become every year more and more similar to the former communist countries, both economically, because of the mergers and acquisitions that have eliminated almost all competitors, and politically because of removing more and more citizen rights and giving excessive rights to the governments.


Despite the former Cold War propaganda and the huge number of fiction books or movies that tried to fantasize about the life in communist countries, the citizens of the Western countries have remained very naive and cannot imagine how bad it really was to live in such countries. Therefore most of them do not understand how dangerous are the abusive laws that are pushed every day by the politicians of their countries.