Holy crap. This is like a software-reachable version of the dynamic memory aliasing hardware attack demonstrated by https://batteringram.eu/
pocksuppet•Aug 13, 2026
Oh that's a clever attack. The RAM bus was often thought of as off-limits because of the speed and signal integrity requirements. They bypassed those.
mschuster91•Aug 13, 2026
The researcher behind this is obviously highly knowledgeable in reverse engineering CPUs to the tune it reminds me of the dwarves digging in Moria...
But why on earth do they have to use AI to write their writeups?!
russdill•Aug 13, 2026
Seriously. Got tired of reading the same idea over and over reworded endlessly.
dcrazy•Aug 13, 2026
I got suspicious but decided it wasn’t AI. The “Foo is the bar.” sentence construct is coherent with the overall “through the looking glass” tenor.
jchw•Aug 13, 2026
Nah, it's not just that, literally all the stuff they've posted this year is obvious LLM writing, none of the stuff from previous years is. To get this close to LLM writing style without actually using an LLM, you would pretty much have to be purposefully trying.
But I have a new favorite way of demonstrating this:
Like, who cares? In today's present, I wouldn't bother writing the article myself neither besides giving the instructions and auditing the output. Substance is what matters
pocksuppet•Aug 13, 2026
Did you test the substance? Did it work? AI can hallucinate substance.
CamperBob2•Aug 13, 2026
If you don't trust the author to do that, then it doesn't matter whether they used AI or not, does it?
jchw•Aug 13, 2026
> Like, who cares?
You are literally asking this to people who clearly care...
> In today's present, I wouldn't bother writing the article myself neither besides giving the instructions and auditing the output.
Then why exactly are you even bothering to reply to me instead of having Claude do it and auditing the output? If HN didn't have a rule against it, would you even bother replying yourself?
But really, there's a fair bit more to unpack here than just that. Why wouldn't you bother? Is writing a README.md about some project you worked on really that hard? Even with heavy LLM assistance, I'd wager to guess this project, which clearly involved working on real hardware, was more than just prompting. So clearly there was human effort other than prompting. And I do respect that, but I want people who write things to respect my time. I'm not asking them to disclose every tool they use, I'm asking them to not waste our time with crappy irritating Claude writeups. Whether it's explictly specified or not, we know.
Frankly I struggle to believe that people don't really mind if someone else speaks for them in their own voice, just because they're too fucking lazy to speak for themselves anymore. We've had competent GenAI for like a year or two, at this rate people are going to forget their potty training in another few months.
> Substance is what matters
Substance matters, which is not great for LLMs, because they put out text that has far more fluff than substance. What, however, is far worse for LLMs, is the fact that kick and scream and cry all you want, but: style and presentation matters, too.
It is absolutely true that if you just dropped a very brief blurb that all AMD CPUs from a certain generation can be pwned it would have a decent chance to hit the HN frontpage just out of sheer interestingness. That is not because the style and presentation doesn't matter, it's just that the substance is significant in spite of the bad presentation and style.
And absolutely, we can easily forgive someone for simply not being very good at the presentation and style part, certainly I'm not really an expert at it. But this author has released plenty of great hits before, so I damn well know they can. It's a serious disappointment to see them downgrade to irritating, grating Claude garbage output.
circuit10•Aug 13, 2026
I struggled to understand the article, it doesn't properly explain what the exploit is in a way I could immediately understand, after staring at it for a bit and reading comments here I think it's a hardware register that's exposed to user software that shouldn't be but I really didn't understand that at first glance ("Poke the DRAM controller" made me think a hardware exploit) and I'm still not sure if I'm right about that (if it is, just start by explaining that instead of all the unnecessary filler and diagrams and animations of the Mona Lisa being scrambled and talk of bath salts which I still don't understand the relevance of)
toast0•Aug 13, 2026
> I wouldn't bother writing the article myself neither besides giving the instructions and auditing the output.
The article would be better with just the instructions and audited output. All the LLM added bloat is tiring and distracting; it's like an article from New-Yorker or Wired.
MattSteelblade•Aug 13, 2026
I cannot wait for the accompanying Black Hat talk. Christopher Domas is one of my absolute favorite all-time hackers. He does such a fantastic job of explaining his work. Some of my favorite talks of his:
If this is the same dude I am thinking of, his wife is also the CISO of Mozilla and do security research together, afair they have a whole book on x86 reverse engineering.
Very cool!
Intermernet•Aug 13, 2026
x86 Software Reverse‐Engineering, Cracking, and Counter‐Measures
By Stephanie Domas and Christopher Domas
My introduction to his work was "The future of RE Dynamic Binary Visualization"[0] which completely blew me away. It still feels futuristic today, 13 years later. Novel UI/UX paradigms like this are slow to find widespread adoption, even when they're so clearly demonstrated to be such an ideal fit for their purpose.
TBH with the DDD debugger you had a graph with the C structures right away.
superkuh•Aug 13, 2026
I love digraphs. I learned about them from that talk's associated paper... but only about 2 years ago. I've been dumping my system and GPU RAM raw and visualizing via digraphs and it's amazing how such a simple algorithm operating on arbitrary bytes leads to such distinct and consistent image.
aecsocket•Aug 13, 2026
Holy shit, Christopher Domas is back. I remember watching his Defcon talks on x86 shenanigans[^1][^2] and being amazed at what he's been able to discover. Then he got whisked away by Intel and now drops this. I'm excited.
So on an affected system, ring 0 root has access to pretty much everything that was hidden in negative ring territory. The page is pretty quiet about what other processor families might be similar beyond this specific AMD16h (an older AMD low-power family)?
embedding-shape•Aug 13, 2026
As long as you know the controller's translation registers, it's applicable? Not tested on later one's merely because the information wasn't readily available it seems.
> Developed and tested on AMD Family 16h CPUs, the last generation whose datasheets document the DRAM controller's translation registers — and show that they can't be locked. 17h and beyond simply leave this information out.
m1el•Aug 13, 2026
from the GH page:
> Developed and tested on AMD Family 16h CPUs, the last generation whose datasheets document the DRAM controller's translation registers — and show that they can't be locked. 17h and beyond simply leave this information out.
fulafel•Aug 13, 2026
Fascinating. So what is the DCT swizzling functionality designed for in the hardware originally?
Retr0id•Aug 13, 2026
Without any swizzling, certain common access patterns can end up with subpar performance, for example walking the columns of a 2d array with a certain stride - if it ends up directing every access to the same bank on the same channel, the throughput is much lower than if the load was evenly distributed across multiple banks/channels.
Swizzling "randomizes" bank/rank/channel distribution, which makes unlucky access patterns less likely. (Something I'd like to research is microbenchmarking different access patterns to infer the swizzle pattern and defeat physical ASLR)
Retr0id•Aug 13, 2026
Late edit: It also makes it harder to exploit rowhammer etc., if the precise swizzling method is unknown.
devttyeu•Aug 13, 2026
The big question is whether this can break out of KVM and whether it can be microrode patched / patched in any other way.
And whether it's really real in the first place.
summa_tech•Aug 13, 2026
One hopes that a hypervisor would not expose hardware control registers directly in the first place, except ones deliberately designed for virtualization support.
Otherwise, the guest is running effectively at the same privilege level as the hypervisor (that's useful sometimes, but probably not intended in most applications).
devttyeu•Aug 13, 2026
Yeah, just started looking at this with my team (we run a cloud with VM instance offering on AMD so this very much caught our eye)
So far seems this is about right:
1. You need platform register access, so seems can't KVM-escape with just this
2. Big question is what about breaking Confidential SEV-SNP guests from the host?
devttyeu•Aug 13, 2026
Ok, on 2. and in general this exploit only works on pre-Zen AMD platforms as the repo states in not-so-clear terms.
Zen changed DTC (DRAM Controller) to UMC (Unified Memory Controller), UMC is programmed at boot, and one would hope they figured that locking access to it makes sense when they were adding confidential compute support; Not clear though because there is no public documentation on it, so best we can hope for is some statement from AMD/3rd party researcher saying "this won't work on Zen because X/Y/Z"
quotemstr•Aug 13, 2026
This hack is 99% giving people the control over their own computers they should already have had. Guy is a Robin Hood.
MSFT_Edging•Aug 13, 2026
When Chris Domas left Battelle for Intel years back, shortly after hardware-fuzzing a bank of thin-clients to discover undocumented x86 instructions, I was convinced Intel was basically keeping him on the payroll to shut him up.
UltraSane•Aug 13, 2026
Opus refuses to discuss this at all. Make of that what you will.
devttyeu•Aug 13, 2026
Well, K3 has no problem, Sol is also fine-ish
HanClinto•Aug 13, 2026
Likewise -- also had zero issues going over this with Sol. Seemed to give solid advice for how to test it -- use an expendable bare-metal AMD family 16h test system w/ usual standard checks that apply.
> Run `platform_check` first and do not use `SKITTER_FORCE=1` casually. Start with the read-only `dram_state` and `dram_carveouts`, then `dram_dump --dry-run`. Avoid `dram_poke` until maps have been freshly collected and calibrated. Do not bypass fingerprint checks, calibration, fencing, or verification.
Claude's (apparently externally-mandated?) lobotomization continues to be concerning. :-/
rustcleaner•Aug 13, 2026
Guardrails are a product-quality smell. Boycott guardrailed models. Punish guardrailed model providers with reduced revenue and bankruptcy. "I'm sorry Dave" must become a subscription-cancelling response or the nannying will never stop!
ipdashc•Aug 13, 2026
I really hate to be that guy, but man, as someone who was and is a big Christopher Domas fan (and is way dumber than him, I mean, this stuff is seriously over my head)... it's been really disappointing to see him LLM'ing all the READMEs recently. They used to be a joy to read through, but now the Claudeisms made it such a slog I could barely get through a few paragraphs. I'm glad he's using the new tools to get even more cool stuff done, but I wish he'd have gone for a human writeup at the end.
BugsJustFindMe•Aug 13, 2026
I find vague gestures like this almost more annoying than the idea of someone using AI to write.
> the Claudeisms
This is hand-waving. Please be more specific.
> made it such a slog
On the flip-side, I didn't find it a slog at all. What if you're wrong?
austinthetaco•Aug 13, 2026
I'm not the person you are replying to, but the readme is very clearly written by an AI, and it sounds nothing like his older work. Sometimes it's just super clear to people something is written with AI without you getting some sort of singular "gotcha" word or indicator. It's just writing patterns that would be hard to clearly establish rules for here in an HN comment, but it's incredibly obvious when you learn to spot it.
boxed•Aug 13, 2026
I mean, it's super clear to a lot of people that it's written by LLMs EVEN WHEN IT'S NOT. You can't vibe that shit too.
shermantanktop•Aug 13, 2026
I just told my boss to remove a line in a doc because it sounded too AI-y. He then said that he had written it himself.
rustyminnow•Aug 13, 2026
How do you know when it's not written by LLM except to take someone's word? If I got caught slopping I'd be too embarassed to admit it. "I wrote it all myself! I actually majored in slick writing and minored in tenuous metaphor."
gnyman•Aug 13, 2026
I recently vibed a little linked-in AI detector which looks for AI things like rule of three and scores it. It scored it 97% AI polished.
My gut feeling agrees. The rule of three is one of the stronger signals, can't stamp that out of the AI even if you wanted :-)
I'll push it to GH later, it's nothing fancy but it has been quite good in my experience. Here is highlights which it used
```
tricolon coordinated VERB run: “…break / on them collapse / unlock everything .” (3 members)
tricolon coordinated VERB run: “…guard physical addresses / not DRAM coordinates / you rearrange the” (3 members)
tricolon coordinated NOUN run: “…handful of data / it to z3 / the translation matrix” (3 members)
tricolon coordinated NOUN run: “…view / the elaborate fences / locks / security checks the” (4 members)
tricolon coordinated VERB run: “…Read it / the alias map / pipe” (3 members)
```
ipdashc•Aug 13, 2026
> Please be more specific.
The em dashes are the most obvious stereotypical tell, but that doesn't really matter that much (I actually like them and occasionally used them pre-AI). It's hard to put a finger on, but the most annoying LLMism to me is the overdramatic, staccato, almost "epic" way they talk. It feels like a 2009 lens flare effect over everything, it sounds like a stereotypical hacker in a CSI show.
> the last generation whose datasheets document the DRAM controller's translation registers — and show that they can't be locked
> When your code dereferences *p, it appears to access the DRAM at p. It does not — p is a virtual address
> Physical addresses are really more of a suggestion.
> That's the exploit. All of it.
The worst part is that this stuff is genuinely cool and deserves to be dramatic. And I like stereotypical, campy hacker speak! But LLMs are, IDK... bad at it? Or maybe it just becomes a bore to read the same. Exact. Dramatic. Voice. From literally everyone. After you've heard it enough times.
None of this is against Mr. Domas. He seems like a cool person, with a cool voice, and I want to read his voice, not Claude's.
> What if you're wrong?
I definitely could be! Apologies if I am. But with all the em dashes and such, and having read his previous work, I felt confident enough to mention it. And as the sibling comment says, it really is something you just learn to spot over time.
cgyvbunji•Aug 13, 2026
It's the ASCII diagrams for me. Although I hesitate to point it out because they are usually helpful unlike the em dashes. Before LLMs, ASCII diagrams in readmes were a half baked mess, if one were present at all. Now every project has at least one perfectly made ASCII diagram - instant LLM tell.
ipdashc•Aug 13, 2026
> Although I hesitate to point it out because they are usually helpful unlike the em dashes.
Likewise, I don't mind the diagrams. Though they do often have the same flaw as other text, being that the LLM throws in EVERYTHING, vs. a handmade one that'd generally have more taste and discretion to it. That can kind of work in its favor here, since the point is just to show the complexity of the stack, but on the other hand the reader lacks confidence that every item in there is "really" a part of the stack (which I would be fully confident in for this author, had he written it by hand) and not just some process related to memory/DRAM that the LLM decided to toss in.
xorcist•Aug 13, 2026
> When your code dereferences *p, it appears to access the DRAM at p. It does not — p is a virtual address
I hate these especially much: It's at the same both both overly dramatic, it's presented as some great reveal that will change everything, while at the same time being completely trivial and only detracts from the explanation. If you have no idea that memory addresses are translated you will understand absolutely nothing from the text or even what this is all about. If you want to explain what an MMU is, just do that instead and don't present it as some great revelation.
But some equally dramatic phrasings could just as well be something that leaves you astonished. You never know. You have to skim the text to find what is useful information and what is just filler. The signal-to-noise is low.
It's called slop for a reason.
jchw•Aug 13, 2026
"What if you're wrong?"
I'd just like to address this real quick because some people seem to think this is just a "hunch" that has some probability of being false; there is absolutely nothing more certain on planet Earth than the LLM involvement in this writing. It is difficult to come up with things that are certain enough to compare this to to convey the lack of doubt that exists.
I am not going to make fun of you for not being able to tell, although I do find it surprising that people seem to struggle in both directions with telling AI and human writing apart (are our brains really that different?) - I just want it to be clear that some of us can pick up Claudisms within just a couple of sentences with no effort. A Claude-generated sentence, in isolation, may not ring any alarm bells. A few of them in a row, however, that's a load-bearing smoking gun right there.
We can certainly argue to what extent undisclosed LLM involvement is an issue or not, though frankly I don't like reading LLM writeups so I would greatly prefer if people would stop using LLMs for public facing documents. But, it is at least worth making this much clear: we can tell.
jonathrg•Aug 13, 2026
The only other reasonable explanation would be that he has consumed so much LLM content that the machine has erased his voice and replaced it with its own.
vetrom•Aug 13, 2026
Why does this whole set of paragraphs sound vaguely like a Claudeism?
jchw•Aug 13, 2026
This blows my mind just as badly and I see it reasonably often: I talk nothing like any AI model that has ever been, it isn't even close. I'm going to be bold and say that even without checking, more analytical approaches like stylometry would prove me right with little doubt. To mistake my writing for being "AI-esque", you would pretty much have to be entirely blind to the stylistic aspects of the text and fall back on even more superficial details like how verbose it is.
Go ahead and throw the comment into your favorite unreliable AI detector. Even though I suspect they're mostly garbage, my writing is just so far away from what AI models do that it doesn't even matter.
edit: I caved into temptation and checked. Big fat zero on GPTZero.
FabHK•Aug 13, 2026
Could someone ELI5 please? Context, achievement, scope, consequences?
dooglius•Aug 13, 2026
I don't understand the threat model being attacked here. If you had physical DRAM access you could do all of this anyway right? And I would assume that an unprivileged user would not have write access to the DRAM controller registers?
quotemstr•Aug 13, 2026
Even physical DRAM access would be thwarted by transparent total memory encryption, so this hack is still something else.
fulafel•Aug 13, 2026
This doesn't require physical DRAM access, it's all software.
With ring-0 access, this lets you poke "even things walled off and invisible to ring-0 or the CPU itself" including things that the security processor tries hard to wall off.
VorpalWay•Aug 13, 2026
Which arguably is a good thing. As a owner of the system I really should have complete control over it. But currently there is software I have no control over running at even higher privilege levels.
The only modern silicon that gives me full control over what code is running is some (or most?) microcontrollers.
And this isn't just a question of FOSS principle. Especially SMM is problematic by unpredictably taking CPU cycles away from your workload. This can mess up hard realtime workloads, such as found in CNC controllers. If you are running something like LinuxCNC this something you need to measure to figure out if a given computer is suitable for that job.
quotemstr•Aug 13, 2026
This is the level of access the rightful owner of a computer should have to his own system.
He should also be able to fuse away this access forever, to be fair. But out of the box, when I get a new laptop, I should be able to read and write every byte of DRAM.
gmueckl•Aug 13, 2026
OK, so this works on AMD Jaguar according to the README. That's a architecture from 2013. There's notes about Zen 3 having a different base address for the memory controller registers, but that's it. What newer CPUs does attack actually work on?
CartwheelLinux•Aug 13, 2026
That information is intentionally left out
gmueckl•Aug 13, 2026
Then publishing it in this incomplete state is just pointless fearmongering and will just make others fill in this information within the next couple of days. And the good guys likely won't be the first ones to do that.
devttyeu•Aug 13, 2026
Zen has completely different memory controller IP (UMC), that's configured at boot by AGESA/PSP. I doubt this exploit applies to modern Zen CPUs, however AMD are the only ones who could really confirm this.
WhiteDawn•Aug 13, 2026
This is all great to get full unfettered access to your own system, as life should be.
I’m sure Xbox and PlayStation security groups are a little nervous right now though. Getting ring-0 on those machines is near impossible, but once you do then everything else becomes wide open
ransom_rs•Aug 13, 2026
Seems like this should get us a newer PS4 jailbreak?
zahlman•Aug 13, 2026
This is only applicable if you already have root (in order to get beyond that), right? It doesn't expose new risk of local privilege escalation?
odo1242•Aug 13, 2026
Yep, I believe so
ziofill•Aug 13, 2026
But it supercharges what can be done once you get root, no?
odo1242•Aug 13, 2026
Yep.
Permik•Aug 13, 2026
Skitter creek bath salts... Or SCBS
Guess there'll be a talk called Secure Computing BullShit in the next Blackhat conf! I'll be eagerly waiting for it! :)
pocksuppet•Aug 13, 2026
This is probably very interesting, but does it really have to be explained with a solid wall of AI slop writing?
weinzierl•Aug 13, 2026
When I started with computers, DRAM was understandable by a teenager: RAS, CAS, read, done.
Ok, the necessary refresh was always a little pain, but still something manageable.
Nowadays, I feel you need three PhD's to even bring up a micro with DRAM and don't get me started on the proprietary binary blobs necessary just for DRAM access. No wonder PSRAM is a thing.
The corollary is that it shouldn't be too surprising that this gigantic attack surface provides many opportunities. (Of course that doesn't mean it is easy to find them, hat tip to Christopher Domas, just that I expect there to be many more).
ecshafer•Aug 13, 2026
This is so cool. Outside of a cool demo, and maybe some black hat type stuff, this is surely dangerous, a bad idea, and shouldn't be done in prod. But pure hacker ethos at its heart.
raver1975•Aug 13, 2026
I spaghettify my memory every time I write C code.
21 Comments
But why on earth do they have to use AI to write their writeups?!
But I have a new favorite way of demonstrating this:
https://github.com/search?q=owner%3Axoreaxeaxeax+load-bearin...
Guess how many of these are from before 2025.
You are literally asking this to people who clearly care...
> In today's present, I wouldn't bother writing the article myself neither besides giving the instructions and auditing the output.
Then why exactly are you even bothering to reply to me instead of having Claude do it and auditing the output? If HN didn't have a rule against it, would you even bother replying yourself?
But really, there's a fair bit more to unpack here than just that. Why wouldn't you bother? Is writing a README.md about some project you worked on really that hard? Even with heavy LLM assistance, I'd wager to guess this project, which clearly involved working on real hardware, was more than just prompting. So clearly there was human effort other than prompting. And I do respect that, but I want people who write things to respect my time. I'm not asking them to disclose every tool they use, I'm asking them to not waste our time with crappy irritating Claude writeups. Whether it's explictly specified or not, we know.
Frankly I struggle to believe that people don't really mind if someone else speaks for them in their own voice, just because they're too fucking lazy to speak for themselves anymore. We've had competent GenAI for like a year or two, at this rate people are going to forget their potty training in another few months.
> Substance is what matters
Substance matters, which is not great for LLMs, because they put out text that has far more fluff than substance. What, however, is far worse for LLMs, is the fact that kick and scream and cry all you want, but: style and presentation matters, too.
It is absolutely true that if you just dropped a very brief blurb that all AMD CPUs from a certain generation can be pwned it would have a decent chance to hit the HN frontpage just out of sheer interestingness. That is not because the style and presentation doesn't matter, it's just that the substance is significant in spite of the bad presentation and style.
And absolutely, we can easily forgive someone for simply not being very good at the presentation and style part, certainly I'm not really an expert at it. But this author has released plenty of great hits before, so I damn well know they can. It's a serious disappointment to see them downgrade to irritating, grating Claude garbage output.
The article would be better with just the instructions and audited output. All the LLM added bloat is tiring and distracting; it's like an article from New-Yorker or Wired.
- Psychological Warfare in Reverse Engineering https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlUe0TUHOIc
- The MoVfuscator https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7EEoWg6Ekk
- Hardware Backdoors in redacted x86 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmTwlEh8L7g
Very cool!
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/book/10.1002/97813942771...
0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bM3Gut1hIk&pp=ygURY2hyaXN0b...
[^1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH0F9r0siTI
[^2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmTwlEh8L7g
> Developed and tested on AMD Family 16h CPUs, the last generation whose datasheets document the DRAM controller's translation registers — and show that they can't be locked. 17h and beyond simply leave this information out.
Swizzling "randomizes" bank/rank/channel distribution, which makes unlucky access patterns less likely. (Something I'd like to research is microbenchmarking different access patterns to infer the swizzle pattern and defeat physical ASLR)
And whether it's really real in the first place.
Otherwise, the guest is running effectively at the same privilege level as the hypervisor (that's useful sometimes, but probably not intended in most applications).
So far seems this is about right:
1. You need platform register access, so seems can't KVM-escape with just this
2. Big question is what about breaking Confidential SEV-SNP guests from the host?
Zen changed DTC (DRAM Controller) to UMC (Unified Memory Controller), UMC is programmed at boot, and one would hope they figured that locking access to it makes sense when they were adding confidential compute support; Not clear though because there is no public documentation on it, so best we can hope for is some statement from AMD/3rd party researcher saying "this won't work on Zen because X/Y/Z"
> Run `platform_check` first and do not use `SKITTER_FORCE=1` casually. Start with the read-only `dram_state` and `dram_carveouts`, then `dram_dump --dry-run`. Avoid `dram_poke` until maps have been freshly collected and calibrated. Do not bypass fingerprint checks, calibration, fencing, or verification.
Claude's (apparently externally-mandated?) lobotomization continues to be concerning. :-/
> the Claudeisms
This is hand-waving. Please be more specific.
> made it such a slog
On the flip-side, I didn't find it a slog at all. What if you're wrong?
My gut feeling agrees. The rule of three is one of the stronger signals, can't stamp that out of the AI even if you wanted :-)
I'll push it to GH later, it's nothing fancy but it has been quite good in my experience. Here is highlights which it used
``` tricolon coordinated VERB run: “…break / on them collapse / unlock everything .” (3 members) tricolon coordinated VERB run: “…guard physical addresses / not DRAM coordinates / you rearrange the” (3 members) tricolon coordinated NOUN run: “…handful of data / it to z3 / the translation matrix” (3 members) tricolon coordinated NOUN run: “…view / the elaborate fences / locks / security checks the” (4 members) tricolon coordinated VERB run: “…Read it / the alias map / pipe” (3 members) ```
The em dashes are the most obvious stereotypical tell, but that doesn't really matter that much (I actually like them and occasionally used them pre-AI). It's hard to put a finger on, but the most annoying LLMism to me is the overdramatic, staccato, almost "epic" way they talk. It feels like a 2009 lens flare effect over everything, it sounds like a stereotypical hacker in a CSI show.
> the last generation whose datasheets document the DRAM controller's translation registers — and show that they can't be locked
> When your code dereferences *p, it appears to access the DRAM at p. It does not — p is a virtual address
> Physical addresses are really more of a suggestion.
> That's the exploit. All of it.
The worst part is that this stuff is genuinely cool and deserves to be dramatic. And I like stereotypical, campy hacker speak! But LLMs are, IDK... bad at it? Or maybe it just becomes a bore to read the same. Exact. Dramatic. Voice. From literally everyone. After you've heard it enough times.
None of this is against Mr. Domas. He seems like a cool person, with a cool voice, and I want to read his voice, not Claude's.
> What if you're wrong?
I definitely could be! Apologies if I am. But with all the em dashes and such, and having read his previous work, I felt confident enough to mention it. And as the sibling comment says, it really is something you just learn to spot over time.
Likewise, I don't mind the diagrams. Though they do often have the same flaw as other text, being that the LLM throws in EVERYTHING, vs. a handmade one that'd generally have more taste and discretion to it. That can kind of work in its favor here, since the point is just to show the complexity of the stack, but on the other hand the reader lacks confidence that every item in there is "really" a part of the stack (which I would be fully confident in for this author, had he written it by hand) and not just some process related to memory/DRAM that the LLM decided to toss in.
I hate these especially much: It's at the same both both overly dramatic, it's presented as some great reveal that will change everything, while at the same time being completely trivial and only detracts from the explanation. If you have no idea that memory addresses are translated you will understand absolutely nothing from the text or even what this is all about. If you want to explain what an MMU is, just do that instead and don't present it as some great revelation.
But some equally dramatic phrasings could just as well be something that leaves you astonished. You never know. You have to skim the text to find what is useful information and what is just filler. The signal-to-noise is low.
It's called slop for a reason.
I'd just like to address this real quick because some people seem to think this is just a "hunch" that has some probability of being false; there is absolutely nothing more certain on planet Earth than the LLM involvement in this writing. It is difficult to come up with things that are certain enough to compare this to to convey the lack of doubt that exists.
I am not going to make fun of you for not being able to tell, although I do find it surprising that people seem to struggle in both directions with telling AI and human writing apart (are our brains really that different?) - I just want it to be clear that some of us can pick up Claudisms within just a couple of sentences with no effort. A Claude-generated sentence, in isolation, may not ring any alarm bells. A few of them in a row, however, that's a load-bearing smoking gun right there.
We can certainly argue to what extent undisclosed LLM involvement is an issue or not, though frankly I don't like reading LLM writeups so I would greatly prefer if people would stop using LLMs for public facing documents. But, it is at least worth making this much clear: we can tell.
Go ahead and throw the comment into your favorite unreliable AI detector. Even though I suspect they're mostly garbage, my writing is just so far away from what AI models do that it doesn't even matter.
edit: I caved into temptation and checked. Big fat zero on GPTZero.
With ring-0 access, this lets you poke "even things walled off and invisible to ring-0 or the CPU itself" including things that the security processor tries hard to wall off.
The only modern silicon that gives me full control over what code is running is some (or most?) microcontrollers.
And this isn't just a question of FOSS principle. Especially SMM is problematic by unpredictably taking CPU cycles away from your workload. This can mess up hard realtime workloads, such as found in CNC controllers. If you are running something like LinuxCNC this something you need to measure to figure out if a given computer is suitable for that job.
He should also be able to fuse away this access forever, to be fair. But out of the box, when I get a new laptop, I should be able to read and write every byte of DRAM.
I’m sure Xbox and PlayStation security groups are a little nervous right now though. Getting ring-0 on those machines is near impossible, but once you do then everything else becomes wide open
Ok, the necessary refresh was always a little pain, but still something manageable.
Nowadays, I feel you need three PhD's to even bring up a micro with DRAM and don't get me started on the proprietary binary blobs necessary just for DRAM access. No wonder PSRAM is a thing.
The corollary is that it shouldn't be too surprising that this gigantic attack surface provides many opportunities. (Of course that doesn't mean it is easy to find them, hat tip to Christopher Domas, just that I expect there to be many more).
https://jxself.org/titanic.shtml
He did it well. On "security", the author loves more to own his code/adata than anything. as did the PDP10/ITS hackers.