Submission + - Has Windows Data Execution Protection(DEP) helped?
An anonymous reader writes: It has been about two and half years since Microsoft shipped XP Service Pack 2, which enabled software DEP and also supported the NX-bit for hardware-enforced DEP.
The software-enforced DEP was well known in 2004 for being part of the reason that SP2 was slower than SP1, especially on cache-limited CPUs. I myself have begun turning DEP off in the BOOT.INI file on older systems.
The question: Has DEP ever stopped anything, or is it just more useless overhead? I note that I haven't seen Microsoft mention DEP in any recent advisories and Windows continues to be exploited(like last weeks ANI Cursor bug) by system-level holes that DEP was supposed to catch.
The software-enforced DEP was well known in 2004 for being part of the reason that SP2 was slower than SP1, especially on cache-limited CPUs. I myself have begun turning DEP off in the BOOT.INI file on older systems.
The question: Has DEP ever stopped anything, or is it just more useless overhead? I note that I haven't seen Microsoft mention DEP in any recent advisories and Windows continues to be exploited(like last weeks ANI Cursor bug) by system-level holes that DEP was supposed to catch.