Research Inches Toward Processor-Specific Malware

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."

Comments

Re:Am I missing something?

[antifoidulus]

Actually the biggest threat would be to VMs running on some big iron machine. If you and I are both running on a VM and I can exploit a CPU bug that allows me to break out of my sandbox then your data is in trouble even if you didn't let anyone else execute code in your VM.

Re:Ok, maybe this is too simple but

[hairyfeet]

Not to mention it is totally nuts from a malware writer's POV. You have roughly 93% of the business and home desktops running WinOS, with a good portion of those still running the "Hey, let's all run as admin everybody!" XP, and with the huge amounts of home users now on fast connections with NO clue as to whether they are up to date or even if their AV works, jumping through all those hoops to base your malware on a specific CPU would not only be silly it would be purposely limiting your target.

If everyone wants to know what the big targets of the future is gonna be, let this old PC repair guy fill you in: On the home front it'll be Adobe everything, thanks to them not working with MSFT to have updates to their software pushed through Windows Updates so it is ALWAYS out of date, drive by malware courtesy of social sites like FaceBook, JavaScript malware o' the day pushed by the above, and on the mobile side I'm expecting a huge iOS and Android bug any day now, even though with the shitty USA phone networks you won't be getting as much as with a cable or DSL connection, simply because all the malware guys want to go "I did it! Yep, it was me!", and finally don't forget the EVER popular "ZOMG! U Got teh Viruz!!! Run thiz and turn off your broken AV pleasz!" fake AV crap that still spreads like the clap.

So there you go. While some researcher my think the "next wave" will be some uber super hacker shit, I'm willing to bet the pickings are just too easy the way things are for most malware guys to care. Maybe when 2014 rolls around and folks have to either buy new machines or upgrade away from XP will we see things change, as UAC, ASLR, and DEP does make it harder for malware along with WoW on x64, but right now there are still hundreds of millions on XP, and if you add in the ones that will happily turn off their AV just to see the dancing bunnies or will run "special codecs" to see teh prons, well that is a hell of a lot of easy pickings. Remember folks, criminals are just like any other predator and are inherently lazy. If they can nail lots of prey without hardly any work than that is what they WILL do, and working on these machines 6 days a week I can tell you there is a LOT of easy prey out there. No "super uber CPU specific hacks" required.