On Tue, Nov 05, 2002 at 08:03:35PM +0000, Alan Cox wrote: > Flavour of the year appears to be maths sign/overflow mishandling. > Buffer overflows are no longer a growth area as programmers learn that > one.
Gee, only took 'em, what, 40 years? > > For this to catch on in the mainstream, other CPU architectures > > would need to add similar features as well. But given the recent > > burbling from microsoft and intel about palladium and how cpu arch > > changes can enhance security, (which intel seems to be actually > > working on) I do not think that it is too wild, too early or too > > impractical to engage in this task. > > I don't really see how fiddling with libraries helps you, but enlighten > me Well, one thing I can see exploiting under VM would be an agressive use of DCSSes (or something like them--I don't know if you can put DCSSes in other data spaces, and I don't think you can execute code from data spaces, but you see where this is going), so you could share your shared libraries between Linux images. If each one were in its own read-only address space, you'd get a vast reduction in overall memory footprint, plus code couldn't exploit bugs in the standard libraries--even if you have a buffer overflow (or whatever) vulnerability, a) the code is off in its own private address space, so you can't go trash anything else, and b) your virtual machine has that segment marked read-only anyway. Good lord, I can't believe that I'm arguing for a segmented architecture. Adam
