Memristors (long promised and still not quite here) also bring together the ideas of long-term and short-term memory into one and, in future incarnations, even promise to bring computation and storage together.
It'll be a huge paradigm shift in storage and IO speed.
It's unlikely that future technological advancements will give malware authors more tools to work with? That seems unlikely, if history is any indication.
Imagine when you have 1TB of non-volatile storage which operates at speeds close to those we currently enjoy for DDR3 memory. Most average consumers won't use all of that space. It seems entirely plausible that a virus will write itself to some area that is never overwritten. It becomes a latent piece of malware, invisible to any filesystem, but activatable on demand by some other hard-to-detect malware. This two-step scheme would be difficult to detect since the second component does nothing except activate the first component (stored in nonvolatile storage) under some specified criteria.
Or, how about key generation or password input? Remember cperciva's post about how it was extremely difficult or even impossible to zero a memory buffer correctly? Now add in the idea that suddenly "everything is nonvolatile" and you get a perfect storm for security concerns: if a program segfaults or is terminated mid-operation, then suddenly any sensitive data it had spit out into memory might be capturable by other programs. Or, since it's nonvolatile, those secrets will persist "forever" (until they're overwritten, which may be a long, long time if storage is plentiful) and you may inadvertently leak secrets when you sell your memristor-backed storage. Whoever buys it can do some digging and uncover whatever was written into that buffer, if it's truly non-volatile storage.
So, while the future is exciting, underestimating the security implications probably isn't a good idea. We can develop new methodologies to combat the new security concerns, but new security concerns will almost certainly come to fruition. Of course, calling the concerns "new" is somewhat unfair, since new concerns are almost always very old concerns manifesting themselves in new domains, but new domains usually enable malware writers with new toolsets to exploit.
True, even under this model, you could probably have a virus running "resident" in a core without the OS even being aware of it. Basically, it's be like the MMU was a hypervisor and the OS was just a domU within it, unaware of viral "domains." But those viruses probably wouldn't be able to do much, except waste electricity, because they'd need to either get the IOMMU to allocate them some hardware to do IO, or get the OS (which has such hardware) to agree to do IO on its behalf. (Though now we can get into things like intermittent side-channel attacks, where you can mine bitcoins on one cell for minutes and then only have to get the OS to leak a single packet when you have a (rare) success, which is much simpler than getting a whole stable TCP channel or something.)
> 1TB of non-volatile storage [...] Most average consumers won't use all of thatWhen we're creating fully immersive 4D environments in place of holiday snaps then I imagine we're going to be using quite a lot of memory waving through our holiday review with friends.
Funny, I'm the opposite. With all this bandwidth available, why keep stuff?
Locally, if you're using RAID like everyone else, you just have to trust your local electricity supply and your ability not to rm -rf /.
Remote is fine for backups, though.
The 'enables new opportunities that were previous infeasible' component is more exciting. But generally, I think most of it gets swallowed up in more of the old.
The only thing worth debating is whether the GUI design pendulum will have swung between Flat/glossy an even or odd number of times by then :p
I'm sure people will find something to do with it but I'm having a very hard time thinking of situations where you want massive amounts of RAM and also need to be very power conscious or wary of power loss. Certain types of database, perhaps? I wouldn't imagine HPC worries much about power loss. Video game textures don't need to be nonvolatile.
For most purposes you can keep shoving in DRAM and SSDs until you have enough space.
Yeah, of course, everything has security implications and some technologies even more so, but unless one explains them and states how they are specific to the technology being discussed (like you did, for example) then the comment doesn't really add any value.
Writable storage using a centralized access method (file system) is hard enough to purge and keep clean, having a memory mapped persistent chunk of storage that is user process level writable creates an entirely new class of problems.
Getting rid of viruses from BIOS flash is hard enough, this expands that concept to all of userspace.
I sincerely hope the 'x' bit will be off for such memory.
A simple way to counter this is to tag the memory pages as free/used. If the memory controller reads a page as free, any reads from it can return zeroes without hitting the actual memory bus. Any piece of code that wants to hide will not be part of any active object and its page being marked as used should be considered an allocation error and be easily detectable.
Used to get them regularly on my Windows 3 -> Windows XP/2000 days.
Haven't seen them much in Linux or OS X in the last 15 years.
There might have been one or two. But I doubt you can find 10. And the number of users I've seen reported as affected by one was also laughable, something like 1% of all users of less (half to around 1 million).
The non-hacker media of course always touts this or that trojan that actually needs user intervention to be installed as a "virus".
I just assumed they are integrating it into their new super computer