Why Was Intel a No-Show on No Execute?

Why Was Intel a No-Show on No Execute?
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A big part of the brain surgery Microsoft is performing on Windows XP Service Pack 2 is support for new "NX" features in x86 processors. These features allow software (the Windows OS in this case) to mark certain areas of program memory as non-executable. Since a large number of remote attacks—Blaster and Sasser, for example—rely on executing code from areas not intended to hold executable code, proper use of this feature should prevent a large percentage of attacks.

The processor companies, and I suppose Intel in particular, are getting away a little easy on this. Its all hindsight, but why havent we had this feature for years? Buffer overflows have been a big problem for a long, long time, yet weve barely begun to see CPUs from the x86 world that implement the feature.

According to Microsofts explanation of "Execution Protection," the companys name for NX support in Windows, the whole problem has to do with executing code out of areas of the program, basically the stack and heaps, that are reserved for data. This would generally be considered good software engineering practice anyway, but there are a few applications where it could present problems. For software that must manipulate code in a data area and then execute it, Microsoft provides a mechanism to mark the areas as executable.

The classic example, cited by Microsoft, is a just-in-time compiler, or JIT, most famous in the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). I asked Sun about it, and they said changes were made to the JVM for Version 1.5 to support NX and then they backported these changes to the latest 1.4.2_05 release, to be released this summer. Both the 32- and 64-bit VMs support NX.

But not all low-level software requires changes. I asked Sophos, which makes anti-virus software and also owns ActiveState, maker of Perl. Perl is interpreted rather than JIT-ed, so theres little chance it would have a problem. Their anti-virus products arent affected. Its possible to imagine certain debugger techniques causing problems, but there are workarounds for all these cases, and the tools will all be updated to mark pages as executable.

Next page: Idea not a new one.

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