Re:Self-repairing software tackles malware
by xyzzy123 on Friday November 14, 2014 @05:27AM
(#8606520)
In the general case, if you have deployed software which has to work in the face of an arbitrary, integrity damaging attack, you're going to lose.
That's because the attackers get to test their arbitrary code execution against your widely deployed countermeasure (e.g. AV with heuristics, EMET, whatever) until they win. You are the Maginot Line, and they are XYZ.
Funnily enough though, security through obscurity / unusual security measures do beat a lot of canned attacks.
Regehr does cool work on software validation though - it might do what it says. I hope he jumps into this thread and tells us what's actually up :)
Re:Self-repairing software tackles malware
by JoeAltmaier on Friday November 14, 2014 @10:26AM
(#8607532)
That sounds like giving up - no well-known defense can possibly work. So the attackers always win? I don't believe it.
Re:Self-repairing software tackles malware
by unclebucknasty on Friday November 14, 2014 @08:15PM
(#8610491)
I don't know about giving up, but it is very much cat and mouse. Over a long enough timeline, the bad guys will generally score, prompting another round of counter-measures.
So, it's not that the defenses can't possibly work. It's actually that they do, until they don't.
Depending on how A3 works, or something like it would work, I wonder at the level of increased complexity in not only building the "EMT" services in a way to notice something is wrong and to fix it, but building it in a way where those services compare the intent of the program against the actual program and identify ways to improve it.