rumors "microsoft might buy symantic"

Hi therei
all I'm trying to say that a Virus needs to destroy or manipulate DATA which implies there must be an underlying file system.

Until a CPU chip can incorporate a File system which is capable of being manipulated then I can't for the life of me see what protection can be built in to the HARDWARE.

Forgive me from being pedantic or "stressing the point" but any type of "Bridging" type of approach implies controlling this via SOFTWARE -- which then gets us back into the realms of having to load an OS in the first place.

Remember that at the lowest level all an OS is doing is essentially creating and loading a FILE SYSTEM . Once the File system is in place then everything is DATA which is what a Virus can attack.

An application is also just a specialized data file that loads a bunch of executable code which the CPU executes. The CPU cannot of its own decide for example if a command such as STORE LONG is a virus or part of a real application. To decide this an ALGORITHM needs to decide and this implies that SOFTWARE must be running. The OS only PASSES instructions to the CPU.

A bit pedantic I agree but people should clearly understand where the Hardware and Software boundaries lie.

Cheers
jimbo

Yes, of course we need software.

I see that my misunderstanding your previous posts and my way of putting my ideas could have caused this chaos.

But when I mentioned hardware-enhanced security, I didn't mean security provided by hardware. What I tried to say was security supported by hardware.

For explanation purposes: It can be small dedicated CPU which will provide all necessary resources for dedicated security OS which on its own turn ensure security of your main OS.
(It is not really hard to code security OS to be able to understand all Linux, Windows and OSX language.)

The security is of course provided by the software (special OS) but it is support with dedicated hardware whose task is fuelling this security software and nothing else.
As you can see it IS hardware-enhanced security in terms of hardware supported software.

As far as I can see you are saying the almost the same thing.
But the way we put it seems have cause misunderstandings.
I hope we understand each other now. :)