Comments on: Taking on rootkits with hardware

Travis Schluessler, an Intel security architect, explains how the chipmaker's labs plan to take on sophisticated threats.

[Philips]

It is app logic which vulnerable.

"This allows us to raise the bar as far as to what an attacker would need to do in order to compromise that isolated execution environment."

That sounds like DRM, not protection from explits.
Especially it is easy to draw parallels to how Xbox360 is protected from hacking. Digital signing of OS or something like that.

Security problems raise from the fact that application logic is broken and has "holes". If I can convince administration application that I'm admin and I want to format all hard drives - no protection will ever help.

What Intel can do. For now all OSs use two modes: privileged (for administration) and unprivileged (for mere mortals). If somehow CPU can help OS to narrow down what application can do - e.g. which system calls it can do or which kernel memory regions it can access - that might help.

If process needs access to only particular resources - it will have access to only that particular resources. At moment such support on O level is incredibly expensive due to very high CPU overhead when execution goes from one task to another. That's where Intel can truly help - releive OS of that duties and perform them in CPU.

P.S. Or allow OS to micro-program CPU to effectively perform such tasks for OS.

[bobby_brady]

When I see the word Rootkit, I think of Sony

eom

[AimsAlpha]

BAD IDEA

Not a good idea at all... this basically just allows something deeper than the OS to hack. Everything is hackable and exploitable, if someone is dedicated and smart enough to hack or crack a program, then it will be done. There's "anti-virus this" and "protection this" popping up all the time, but we still have the same problems we've had all the time.

Plus think about this, the reason IE is so unsuccesful is because its buried so deep into the OS that when exploits are created they are serious threats. This follows the basic principle, if someone finds out how to exploit the firmware, then there's no telling what control they could have over the computer...

I just think this is Intel's attempt at trying to beat AMD. Check out CNETs article comparing dual core processors. AMD clearly beats Intel there.

^a10