Re: How to develop a random number generation device

John Larkin jjlarkin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx posted to
sci.electronics.design:

On Tue, 11 Sep 2007 17:28:32 +0100, Nobody <nobody@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

On Tue, 11 Sep 2007 07:44:01 -0700, John Larkin wrote:

Cool. When can we expect buffer overrun exploits to be impossible
under Windows?

When it stops letting you run arbitrary machine code.

Nothing the OS does can prevent machine code from overrunning a
buffer.

Ancient computers, PDP-11 and VAX certainly, had memory management
hardware that separated I and D space, where I space was read-only,
and D space could not be executed. And the OS's enforced those
rules. It was common to have many users running the exact same code,
but mapped into different data spaces.

Problem is, neither Intel nor Microsoft was in the mainstream of
computing when they kluged up x86 and Windows.

John

The hardware only became capable of the basics of worthwhile
implementation in early Pentiums, and became capable of really
worthwhile implementations with Opteron (AMD) and EMT64 (Intel).
Microsnoft still has not caught up yet. Just try getting drivers
for 64-bit versions of MS OS's (since Windows2000).



.

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