Dailydave mailing list archives
Re: luckily, there are no dumb questions
From: Joanna Rutkowska <joanna () invisiblethings org>
Date: Fri, 08 Jun 2007 10:35:53 +0200
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 dan () geer org wrote:
Luckily, there are no dumb questions or this would likely be one. How is it so that MS Windows uses only Rings 0 & 3? An engineering answer, a marketing answer, and/or an historical answer would be welcome. Don't know why I never thought to ask before, but I'm asking now. (And if I'm really wrong, please tell me what uses 1|2.)
There is no advantage of using any more rings on current IA32 platforms, as we do not have something called IOMMU, which means that even if we decided to e.g. kept all device drivers in ring 1, then they could still compromise the (micro)kernel memory (i.e. ring0 thing) using DMA. The other question is -- even if we had IOMMU, would it be really profitable to keep device drivers in ring 1, while all the rest of the code (usermode apps + services) in ring 3? I'm not sure, probably it would be equally possible (i.e. from the performance point of view) to keep everything in ring 3. (Somebody can please correct me on this?) AFAIK this is what MINIX3 does (i.e. all drivers and system services are kept in separated address spaces in ring 3). Even though today it doesn't offer too much of security (due to lack of IOMMU -- see above), but IOMMU is coming to everybody houses in 2008 or so! joanna. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- iQEVAwUBRmkU58wG7MOLAMOlAQJOywf/ckpmgCZpS+aYXDJ9vMthiNmUBYO4Vf9L cDRwwZHSk1eq2sS6iNjD0/ARQ+3/UKtYWQBLBR3q8tLmuWtEmUHUz85wVbjQU69/ 2f802dlP6XeoeHjljCrzhdmSEu7J1Y80UjFmFbYeP8FbZBIQlVZJK7IDqw+1WskO fEJlmz1TeXM+br5+NRNyjeD/nRxQ497C8ASStmozg1062bwzfgKUPnl2YydtPmOW qK60zXd6Q0usUTInNud4Za7+PzQ/MADDCzI+3VLlOJahBWxgxGqCMA/VfE1/aAyW qoBTjQhFz/0aV/g0whovYXQInoBsy5vTyxizr6MfomDwzzlH9z1odw== =ENC0 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ Dailydave mailing list Dailydave () lists immunitysec com http://lists.immunitysec.com/mailman/listinfo/dailydave
Current thread:
- luckily, there are no dumb questions dan (Jun 07)
- Re: luckily, there are no dumb questions Andreas Junestam (Jun 07)
- Re: luckily, there are no dumb questions Andrew Cushman (Jun 07)
- Re: luckily, there are no dumb questions Joanna Rutkowska (Jun 08)
- Re: luckily, there are no dumb questions dan (Jun 08)
- Re: luckily, there are no dumb questions Bruce Ediger (Jun 08)
- Re: luckily, there are no dumb questions Andreas Junestam (Jun 07)