Everything old is new again

No, really.
- VMS had memory protection up the wazoo from the get-go
- HP-UX has had OS level virtualization for a long time, IIRC assisted by the PA-RISC hardware (mind, this was on workstations)
- OS/390 supported "logical partitioning" - basically hardware virtualization, with the hypervisor stored in firmware - back in the 1990s

By computing standards this virtualization and exploit mitigation stuff is not new at all. What took it all so long to make it to x86? Is the x86 architecture really that much of a problem for such features?

 

Yes, I´ve also read about this stuff, it´s kinda surprising that these technologies aren´t really new.

I also think that innovation in PC security is going too slow. I even took a break of 3 years from the Wilders Security Forums (I didn´t post from 2010 to 2013) because IMO nothing exciting was going on. But the Win 8 OS, exploit protection, hypervisors and virtualization brought some excitement back.

 

That's the problem though, this stuff is only innovation insofar as it's new on x86. On PA-RISC, Alpha, POWER, and other high-end architectures, not so much.

Makes me wonder why in the heck we're using x86 for everything, seeing as it took so long to get feature parallel with other architectures (and with more resource intensive implementations too).

NB, most of the historic mainframe and workstation architectures were RISC, not CISC. I wonder if there are security advantages to RISC architectures in terms of memory management?

 

And why didn´t Windows make use of Ring 1 and 2? If I understood it correctly, it could have made it more difficult to hack (or compromise) the kernel. On the other hand, it would have made things more difficult for M$.

Here is some more explanation:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6710040/cpu-privilege-rings-why-rings-1-and-2-arent-used

 

According to people on that link, ring 1 and 2 are pretty much unique to x86. Most of the older RISC architectures (running more powerful OSes) didn't have those, only privileged and unprivileged mode.

... I'm also astounded by the sheer resource consumption of newer OSes. 500 MB idle RAM consumption on Win7, not including buffers and caches! HP-UX by what I'm reading had more advanced security features, and ran on machines with a tenth as much RAM.

Heck, OpenBSD still runs great on a Transmeta Crusoe tablet with < 500 MB of RAM - but only if you don't run any GTK2 or GTK3 programs. Though Qt4 stuff might work if you use the Motif theme, I will have to check that out.

(Still, I wish people would focus less on eyecandy and more on utility!)

 

That´s true, right now I´m not on Win 8, but I think it was using at least 1GB.

Of course not a real problem on new machines, with loads of RAM.