RE: How Secure is Windows, Really?

Of course, is you really care about security, I suggest that you get ready
for the next generation of exploit.  This exploit, properly crafted, will
destroy any software on any machine running the appropriate chip.

Everybody has been ooh-ing and aah-ing about virtual machines, but the
problem is that a properly crafted virtual machine cannot be distinguished
from the hardware it emulates.  And from this you get the Blue Pill exploit,
in which you basically control the horizontal and the vertical (to mix pop
culture references from two generations).

Joanna Rutkowska, a brilliant software theorist and quite the hacker,
designed the exploit for the AMD SVM architecture.  Rutkowska is the same
engineer who, live and on stage, blew away Vista's driver signing technology
using a page fault exploit -- she managed to load unsigned code into Vista's
kernel.

Microsoft then "fixed" the problem by disabling write access to the disk
from user mode programs, which means that raw disk editors, but that really
didn't address the underlying issue.

Anyway, the stuff we're arguing about in this list becomes small potatoes
unless the PC world takes some huge steps into the world of security.
Non-Von Neumann architectures and hardened kernels will be required if you
want to run your business on a commodity PC.

http://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.com/

Joe