25 Jun
2006
25 Jun
'06
7:27 p.m.
Don Y wrote:
Grrr... sorry, I should qualify this: I mean as it
applies
to "general purpose" computing (NOT to "appliances").
I seem to recall Windows 2000 (and later) checks the CRC on the application
before it loads it - maybe that just covers the PE (Portable Executable)
header, but I heard of a fair bit of software that would run on Win9x, but not
on the NT series OSes, because of some checksum issue.
As far as *nix goes, I think Linux just checks the ELF signature and
executable header checksum. Don't take that as the gospel truth though, I
haven't done any major research into the ELF file format...
And of course there's games consoles (the Xbox, Xbox360 and Nintendo DS do
cryptographic checks on software before it's allowed to run), but that's not
really "general purpose computing".
--
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