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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)."
"Moreover, the authors discuss the potential of more sophisticated attacks, like accessing the screen pixels periodically and harvest private data displayed on the user screen"
I guess we just change all fields to mask the entries with **** or if we want to really fool them use dots.
I used to run a small computer repair and write-to-order software shop for a living while in the Uni with two more people. One of them had that idea around 1994. In those days it was just to store the code in the video RAM pages which are not directly accessible to a scanner and keep a small polymorphic backstrap routine in main memory.
What goes around comes around. Looks like this is using a similar approach. Even if you compute some stuff on the card you still need a bootstrap within the main system to use it and talk back to the "mothership".
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
This should make for some wonderful new kinds of pop up ads that can't be dismissed or in any way taken out of focus.
User and role based authentication/authorization is essential to security, but not sufficient. A machine that brings authentication/authorization down to the process level would be more secure.
I'd like a PC that enforced access control on each process running. Every call to any HW, whether CPU, MMU, GPU, or any bus, to require authentication. A crypto ASIC with scores of simultaneous auth units pointing at each process space and the ACL table for auth in just a few extra clock ticks on operations per process, at startup and randomly every dozen or so calls. More frequently when there's a "heightened alert" either by network notification or during and after other security events like DoS attacks and malware discovery.
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make install -not war
Modern GPUs include memory protection, so different processes can be prevented from reading each others' VRAM, just as they can be prevented from running each others' RAM. This is not always used by the drivers, which may just map the entire physical VRAM into the GPU's virtual address space. With properly written drivers, this is much harder.
The big malware potential comes from WebGL. This allows you to run arbitrary GLSL code in the browser's (GPU) address space. Although you probably can't take over the entire display, you can potentially take over the entire browser window without permission. Hopefully, the driver will give you entirely separate GPU address spaces per GL context, but given how incompetent AMD and nVidia's driver teams have demonstrated themselves to be, I doubt it.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
It would be pretty difficult to determine which pixels are the URL bar on the GPU though.
No, not really. The browser window's address bar is a pretty easy shape for simple computer vision algorithms to spot, and you've go access to a nice parallel processor to run them on...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Yeah, I suppose. I could make this happen today if I knew how to dump the screen buffer contents to a readable array in device global memory in CUDA.
-- Let us endeavor so to live that when we pass even the undertaker shall be sorry. -- M. Twain
Fortunately, it's running on the GPU, which we all know from the marketing hype is an amazing infinitely powerful CPU. It will have no problem running a recognition program to find the URL bar.