"Safer" processors for your own good

[joey tribiani]

Chips to ease Microsoft's big security nightmare


10:00 22 February 04

Exclusive from New Scientist Print Edition.

Chip makers are planning a new generation of microprocessors that should plug the gaps that led Microsoft to issue a "critical security alert" last week.

The alert was sparked by the discovery that a raft of Microsoft programs were vulnerable to a problem called "buffer overflow", which hackers can exploit to extract private information from a PC. And the risk of such attacks only worsened when, two days after the alert was issued, critical Windows "source code" was leaked on to the internet letting hackers see how it works.

A buffer is a section of computer memory that can store a set amount of data. Sometimes, usually because of a software bug, the processor sends more data to the buffer than it can hold, causing it to overflow into the next chunk of buffer memory. This makes computers vulnerable to hackers, because by deliberately making a buffer overflow they can force the computer to execute their malicious code.


How hackers exploit buffer overflow
The problem is hard to detect, as popular programming languages, like C and C++ do not make it easy to track when programs are vulnerable to overflow. But now chip makers Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Intel are developing processor chips that will deal with the problem.

AMD's Athlon-64 (for PCs) and Opteron (for servers) will protect against buffer overflows when used with a new version of Windows XP. Intel plans similar features on next generation Pentium chips. Fom "New Scientist "http://www.newscientist.com/news/print.jsp?id=ns99994696

[hawkburn]

This is all good and well.. But soon they're going to be starting to make chips that have built-in Microsoft activation protection, but that'll probably be stopped because IBM compatible PC's can also use Linux

[rastilin]

Far more likely that some enterprising nerd will release a "patched" version of windows.