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Comment by sajithw | Hacker News Reader

It's a long term investment to bring security down to the hardware level.

Bringing security down to the hardware level only means you'll be enabling virus-access to the hardware level because hardware will never keep up with software.

"Bringing security down to the hardware level only means you'll be enabling virus-access to the hardware level"

How does that follow? We've had "security" at the hardware level for years. The hardware is as accessible as it'll ever be -- it's only going to get more locked down from here.

A better investment would be to fix the holes in the first place.

Or, better yet, spend that money to educate users and administrators alike on how to protect themselves.

1) How are they responsible for the holes? 2) How would this make them money?

I could easily see it becoming BigCo policy to only use hardware with Enterprise Security Robustness(tm), if only as an ass-covering move.

Fixing security vulnerabilities in every piece of software ever written (or to be written) seems like a hell of a lot more work than hardening the processor. Non-executable memory, for example, eliminates a whole class of vulnerabilities in which illicitly added code is run from the stack or heap.

To suggest that further work on the processor security model is a waste because people ought to have done it right the first time is blind to the fact that people will screw up no matter what.

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