Malware Running On Graphics Cards

An anonymous reader writes "Given the great potential of general-purpose computing on graphics processors, it is only natural to expect that malware authors will attempt to tap the powerful features of modern GPUs to their benefit. In this paper, the authors demonstrate the feasibility of implementing a malware that can utilize the GPU (PDF) to evade virus scanning applications. Moreover, the authors discuss the potential of more sophisticated attacks, like accessing the screen pixels periodically to harvest private data displayed on the user screen, or to trick the the user by displaying false, benign-looking information when visiting rogue web sites (e.g., overwriting suspicious URLs with benign-looking ones in the browser's address bar)."

Comments

Re:I am pleased

[hairyfeet]

Ooooohhh no, you're not thinking evil enough. If you are gonna go to THIS much trouble, you need to go WMD evil, like this:cue twilight zone theme imagine if you will, a poor PC user, slowly being driven out of his mind, because no matter what he clicks, no matter where he goes, all he gets is "The Safety Dance" on an endless loop while a midget moons him onscreen. He tries to play a game? Safety Dance. Watch a video/listen to music? Safety Dance. no matter how many times he reboots he cannot escape the asshole zone

As for TFA, seriously though how easy would such an attack be? It isn't like CPUs where you only have AMD and Intel, with GPUs you got a million of those from the old DX7s to the latest multi core monsters, you got chips by ATI, Nvidia, Intel, Via, SiS, so wouldn't that raise the PITA factor by like a thousand? even if you targeted the lowest common denominator, like say DX8, aren't there differences between the way ATI, Nvidia, and Intel do things? And looking at TFA they are targeting CUDA, and don't you have to have support for that installed? Which would make the target so teeny tiny that unless you were really pissed at Pixar or something would make this not worth the trouble? And if written in CUDA it won't work on ATI, yes? I guess one more reason to be happy I switched to an AMD/ATI only shop.

Maybe I'm just too old a greybeard and am not getting it, but I always thought the point of malware was to hit as big a target as possible. Wouldn't this make the target so tiny as to not be worth the effort? Why would a malware writer go for this over say the latest Adobe Reader/Flash hole?