Introduction to the Special Issue on the Workshop on Architectural Support for Security and Anti-virus (WASSA)

摘要

As the size of the Internet has grown, the opportunities for security attacks have also grown. Malicious code can be used to infect single systems, a local network of systems, or can replicate itself across the entire Internet. The impact can be limited to incapacitating a single machine, to disabling a network switch, or to flooding an Internet site with so much traffic as to make it unreachable. In its first year, the Workshop on Architectural Support for Security and Anti-virus (WASSA) has provided a forum for researchers working on architectural approaches to remedy these problems to discuss their research. Little has been done in the past by the architecture community to develop new strategies for protecting computing systems from malicious software attacks, or develop strategies to accelerate anti-virus workloads. Only recently have we begun to see a new ideas being submitted to architecture conferences that address this important issue.