#1 - "But the point is MS products are vulnarable over the platfomr itselft, then whats the point."
Well, that's kinda the point of having the hardware help out with security. See, hardware can be more easily tested because it does a much smaller subset of things.
For instance, I might use software to place some information on an area of the disk that is marked as "for my eyes only". The hardware would then prevent any process from accessing that information without some kinda of credentials set.
I hear you saying "but what if those creditentials are forged or the software fails"... again, the hardware might provide some kind infrastructure that makes that compromise far less likely. For instance, physical barriers between memory areas of applications, and memory areas of the OS. Many buffer overflows are exploitable only because it's trivial to throw a memory address on the stack and call any function in memory, including dangerous OS library functions.
At any rate, the hardware backs up the software to make the task of breaking through security much harder. Kind of like having a paid guard (the "software") backed up by a big-ass metal door with a lock on it (the "hardware").
|