The next generation of Intel mobile processors will include malware protection built into the chip and the protection, provided by Intel’s Control-Flow Enforcement Technology, will first be available in the company’s “Tiger Lake” mobile processors, Vice President of Intel’s Client Computing Group Tom Garrison revealed. CET is designed to protect against the misuse of legitimate code through control-flow hijacking attacks, which is widely used in large classes of malware. With control-flow protections built into Intel’s hardware, it will be possible to detect memory attacks earlier in the process, noted Ray Vinson, senior product manager at Spirent, a telecommunications testing company in Sunnyvale, California.
Among the leading malware attacks currently mounted by hackers are “fileless” attacks, where malicious code is loaded directly into memory, noted James McQuiggan, security awareness advocate for KnowBe4, a security awareness training provider in Clearwater, Florida. This style is difficult for antimalware applications to detect, since they look for binary, executable applications running from a hard drive.
