6 ms·

.. and possibly give viruses more places to hide?

by nacnud 12y ago

deeviant 12y ago
Na, virus already hide both on disk and in memory.
valarauca1 12y ago
Unlikely. Unless we start making file systems different.
- sillysaurus3 12y ago
  Spectators may want to archive this HN thread for posterity, because I suspect nacnud will have the last laugh. (Nacnud's comment is currently sitting at about -3 points.) It's unlikely that future technological advancements will give malware authors more tools to work with? That seems unlikely, if history is any indication. Imagine when you have 1TB of non-volatile storage which operates at speeds close to those we currently enjoy for DDR3 memory. Most average consumers won't use all of that space. It seems entirely plausible that a virus will write itself to some area that is never overwritten. It becomes a latent piece of malware, invisible to any filesystem, but activatable on demand by some other hard-to-detect malware. This two-step scheme would be difficult to detect since the second component does nothing except activate the first component (stored in nonvolatile storage) under some specified criteria. Or, how about key generation or password input? Remember cperciva's post about how it was extremely difficult or even impossible to zero a memory buffer correctly? Now add in the idea that suddenly "everything is nonvolatile" and you get a perfect storm for security concerns: if a program segfaults or is terminated mid-operation, then suddenly any sensitive data it had spit out into memory might be capturable by other programs. Or, since it's nonvolatile, those secrets will persist "forever" (until they're overwritten, which may be a long, long time if storage is plentiful) and you may inadvertently leak secrets when you sell your memristor-backed storage. Whoever buys it can do some digging and uncover whatever was written into that buffer, if it's truly non-volatile storage. So, while the future is exciting, underestimating the security implications probably isn't a good idea. We can develop new methodologies to combat the new security concerns, but new security concerns will almost certainly come to fruition. Of course, calling the concerns "new" is somewhat unfair, since new concerns are almost always very old concerns manifesting themselves in new domains, but new domains usually enable malware writers with new toolsets to exploit.
  - innguest 12y ago
    Also let's not forget HP said it's possible that memristors will also perform computation, which melds RAM, HDD and CPU into one and makes for a potentially wilder environment for viruses.
    - derefr 12y ago
      If we keep to the implicitly-shared-by-default UMA/NUMA architecture we've been working with so far. I'd imagine a combined compute-memory-storage unit would be mostly hardware-isolated, with something resembling message-passing semantics for cross-core communication. Something more like FPGA cells, or Erlang processes. (With the likely property that you could have pools of these cells that act like plain memory, for other cells to share and manipulate using handles/segment descriptors/whatever.) True, even under this model, you could probably have a virus running "resident" in a core without the OS even being aware of it. Basically, it's be like the MMU was a hypervisor and the OS was just a domU within it, unaware of viral "domains." But those viruses probably wouldn't be able to do much, except waste electricity, because they'd need to either get the IOMMU to allocate them some hardware to do IO, or get the OS (which has such hardware) to agree to do IO on its behalf. (Though now we can get into things like intermittent side-channel attacks, where you can mine bitcoins on one cell for minutes and then only have to get the OS to leak a single packet when you have a (rare) success, which is much simpler than getting a whole stable TCP channel or something.)
  - j_s 12y ago
    I will archive this thread to save this: > 1TB of non-volatile storage [...] Most average consumers won't use all of that
    - pbhjpbhj 12y ago
      I'm with you I got my first 1TB HDD last year thinking it would last a few years. Nearly full now. Why? Because with all that space available I've changed how I use disk space - why throw stuff away. Also that I've moved to a higher grade camera and moved to consuming video stored on HDD rather than from discs. When we're creating fully immersive 4D environments in place of holiday snaps then I imagine we're going to be using quite a lot of memory waving through our holiday review with friends.
avn2109 12y ago
Also, it'll be a wide and fallow field for the NSA's insertion of backdoors.
coldtea 12y ago
Viruses are still a thing? Used to get them regularly on my Windows 3 -> Windows XP/2000 days. Haven't seen them much in Linux or OS X in the last 15 years. There might have been one or two. But I doubt you can find 10. And the number of users I've seen reported as affected by one was also laughable, something like 1% of all users of less (half to around 1 million). The non-hacker media of course always touts this or that trojan that actually needs user intervention to be installed as a "virus".

.. and possibly give viruses more places to hide?

by nacnud 12y ago

.. and possibly give viruses more places to hide?

deeviant 12y ago

Na, virus already hide both on disk and in memory.

valarauca1 12y ago

Unlikely. Unless we start making file systems different.

sillysaurus3 12y ago
Spectators may want to archive this HN thread for posterity, because I suspect nacnud will have the last laugh. (Nacnud's comment is currently sitting at about -3 points.) It's unlikely that future technological advancements will give malware authors more tools to work with? That seems unlikely, if history is any indication. Imagine when you have 1TB of non-volatile storage which operates at speeds close to those we currently enjoy for DDR3 memory. Most average consumers won't use all of that space. It seems entirely plausible that a virus will write itself to some area that is never overwritten. It becomes a latent piece of malware, invisible to any filesystem, but activatable on demand by some other hard-to-detect malware. This two-step scheme would be difficult to detect since the second component does nothing except activate the first component (stored in nonvolatile storage) under some specified criteria. Or, how about key generation or password input? Remember cperciva's post about how it was extremely difficult or even impossible to zero a memory buffer correctly? Now add in the idea that suddenly "everything is nonvolatile" and you get a perfect storm for security concerns: if a program segfaults or is terminated mid-operation, then suddenly any sensitive data it had spit out into memory might be capturable by other programs. Or, since it's nonvolatile, those secrets will persist "forever" (until they're overwritten, which may be a long, long time if storage is plentiful) and you may inadvertently leak secrets when you sell your memristor-backed storage. Whoever buys it can do some digging and uncover whatever was written into that buffer, if it's truly non-volatile storage. So, while the future is exciting, underestimating the security implications probably isn't a good idea. We can develop new methodologies to combat the new security concerns, but new security concerns will almost certainly come to fruition. Of course, calling the concerns "new" is somewhat unfair, since new concerns are almost always very old concerns manifesting themselves in new domains, but new domains usually enable malware writers with new toolsets to exploit.
- innguest 12y ago
  Also let's not forget HP said it's possible that memristors will also perform computation, which melds RAM, HDD and CPU into one and makes for a potentially wilder environment for viruses.
  - derefr 12y ago
    If we keep to the implicitly-shared-by-default UMA/NUMA architecture we've been working with so far. I'd imagine a combined compute-memory-storage unit would be mostly hardware-isolated, with something resembling message-passing semantics for cross-core communication. Something more like FPGA cells, or Erlang processes. (With the likely property that you could have pools of these cells that act like plain memory, for other cells to share and manipulate using handles/segment descriptors/whatever.) True, even under this model, you could probably have a virus running "resident" in a core without the OS even being aware of it. Basically, it's be like the MMU was a hypervisor and the OS was just a domU within it, unaware of viral "domains." But those viruses probably wouldn't be able to do much, except waste electricity, because they'd need to either get the IOMMU to allocate them some hardware to do IO, or get the OS (which has such hardware) to agree to do IO on its behalf. (Though now we can get into things like intermittent side-channel attacks, where you can mine bitcoins on one cell for minutes and then only have to get the OS to leak a single packet when you have a (rare) success, which is much simpler than getting a whole stable TCP channel or something.)
- j_s 12y ago
  I will archive this thread to save this: > 1TB of non-volatile storage [...] Most average consumers won't use all of that
  - pbhjpbhj 12y ago
    I'm with you I got my first 1TB HDD last year thinking it would last a few years. Nearly full now. Why? Because with all that space available I've changed how I use disk space - why throw stuff away. Also that I've moved to a higher grade camera and moved to consuming video stored on HDD rather than from discs. When we're creating fully immersive 4D environments in place of holiday snaps then I imagine we're going to be using quite a lot of memory waving through our holiday review with friends.

avn2109 12y ago

Also, it'll be a wide and fallow field for the NSA's insertion of backdoors.

coldtea 12y ago

Viruses are still a thing? Used to get them regularly on my Windows 3 -> Windows XP/2000 days. Haven't seen them much in Linux or OS X in the last 15 years. There might have been one or two. But I doubt you can find 10. And the number of users I've seen reported as affected by one was also laughable, something like 1% of all users of less (half to around 1 million). The non-hacker media of course always touts this or that trojan that actually needs user intervention to be installed as a "virus".