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:Hehe, what goes around comes around

[TheRaven64]

DMA is not a problem. It goes via the GART (and has since the AGP days), so the GPU can only see the bits of memory that it is explicitly shown. A bigger problem is that separate processes may not be isolated from each other on the GPU, so your WebGL program and your window server may be running in the same virtual address space on the GPU. Your WebGL program is then free to read or write any window's contents, as long as it can find the correct virtual address for the buffers.