Heterogeneous architectures: Malware and countermeasures

Malware is becoming smarter and stealthier and it is increasingly widespread over a large number of heterogeneous platforms. Most often, malicious software is especially built for a given target environment as it leverages its peculiarities. However, many similarities exist among malicious approaches. Such common features can be used to prevent, detect and react to such threat. This chapter discusses the above introduced threat and shows how advanced virtualization technology (quite common on most multicore CPU architectures) can be of help in monitoring, analyzing and protecting heterogeneous software/hardware architectures from malware.