Researchers Set To Work On Malware-Detecting CPUs (helpnetsecurity.com)

Orome1 quotes a report from Help Net Security: Adding hardware protections to software ones in order to block the ever increasing onslaught of computer malware seems like a solid idea, and a group of researchers have just been given a $275,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to help them work on a possible solution: malware-detecting CPUs. This project, titled "Practical Hardware-Assisted Always-On Malware Detection," will be trying out a new approach: they will modify a computer's CPU chip to feature logic checks for anomalies that can crop up while software is running. "The modified microprocessor will have the ability to detect malware as programs execute by analyzing the execution statistics over a window of execution," Ponomarev noted. "Since the hardware detector is not 100-percent accurate, the alarm will trigger the execution of a heavy-weight software detector to carefully inspect suspicious programs. The software detector will make the final decision. The hardware guides the operation of the software; without the hardware the software will be too slow to work on all programs all the time."

Comments

Not the first

[campuscodi]

Since 2014 I've been reading about hardware-based detection. I'm starting to think this is just panacea... like those cloud-based antivirus engines that never picked up anything. Here's a bunch of research on the topic: http://www.ieee-security.org/T... http://caslab.eng.yale.edu/wor... http://www.cs.binghamton.edu/~... http://www.cs.binghamton.edu/~...