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Research Inches Toward Processor-Specific Malware

Posted by samzenpus on from the acquiring-new-targets dept.

chicksdaddy writes "The Windows/Office/IE monoculture is disappearing faster than equatorial glaciers — Mac OS X and iOS, Linux and Android ... and whole new application ecosystems to go with each. That's bad news for malware authors and other bad guys, who count on 9.5 out of 10 systems running Windows and Microsoft applications to do their magic. What's the solution? Why, hardware specific hacks, of course! After all, the list of companies making CPUs is far smaller than, say, the list of companies making iPhone applications. Malware targeting one or more of those processors would work regardless of what OS or applications were installed. There's just one problem: its not easy to figure out what kind of CPU a device is running. But researchers at France's Ecole Superiore d'Informatique, Electronique, Automatique (ESIEA) are working on that problem. Threatpost.com reports on a research paper that lays out a strategy for fingerprinting processors by observing subtle differences in the way they perform complex floating point calculations. The method allows them to distinguish broad subsets of processor types by manufacturer, and researchers plan to refine their methods and release a tool that can make specific processor fingerprinting a snap."

2 of 155 comments (clear)

  1. Who sponsored the research? by Un+pobre+guey · · Score: 3, Interesting

    So is the Ukrainian Mob giving out academic research grants these days? Not such a bad idea from their end.

  2. Re:I think I can explain the real threat here... by wvmarle · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Reason to launch an attack like this (I get your idea; but no idea whether it really works like that) is that the ecosystem is smaller, just a few processors to care about. Now you're exploiting a specific bug: I wonder whether such bugs (if they are possible and exist) would last in between major revisions of Intel's or AMD's processor lines.

    Regardless it makes me wonder why you need to know the processor type in the first place? Isn't it possible to craft your software in a way that if the bug is hit the next code is run as assembly (a few bytes is enough to jump to where the real code is), but if the attack fails the program will continue to execute and just launch the next attack? Trial and error basically... just try a bunch of attacks and see which works... and as soon as one works you're in and can forget about the rest of your original javascript program.