Transmeta to add antivirus feature to chips

It doesn't protect buffer overflows, just payloads: It can only protect from the payload of a buffer overflow. There's two articles you should notice on Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NX

This article talks about NX and lists current technologies.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PaX

This article is about a 4 year old Linux implementation that emulates (for nominal overhead) an NX bit on some CPUs, or uses it if the CPU has a HW NX bit. The patch properly sets up restrictions to prevent such exploits as we are worried about; however, it can't detect a raw, harmless buffer overflow.

It's important to note that any effective use of NX will break things. PaX breaks about 17 different applications (I have over 500 installed); however, all can be worked around by relaxing restrictions on the binaries. Anyone serious about security would do something similar, and would also break some programs because of it. With its billions of dollars, MS should have a full PaX-like system for Windows XP, with emulation for normal x86 as well; PaX got where it is today in less than four years with one person.; Posted by: bluefoxicy Posted on: 07/17/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use