All your computer security precautions are worthless

Install your Windows Updates. Update your antivirus software. Scan your system regularly. Keep religious backups. It's all good advice -- and it's advice that I give to readers on a near-daily basis.

And maybe it's all meaningless.

MIT researchers are warning that it doesn't matter much what security measures you take with your computer. If someone wants in, they're getting in.

The latest concern/attack involves data "leakage," the idea that no matter how secure your data might be in storage (even if it's encrypted), once it's in actual use, it's fair game. One area of research involves cached data: Say you decrypt your secret spreadsheet outlining your plans for world domination and have it open on your desktop. Other programs running in the background uses that same working area (the cache) on the machine... and, coded properly, one such program could relatively easily "steal" what else is going on in the cache at that time.

A variation on such an attack has been used to break otherwise rock-solid AES encryption keys. Called "cache timing," the attack determines which specific portions of a computer's memory are used during a decryption process, and can rebuild the key -- in seconds -- just by looking at the pattern of those memory accesses.

Up next: Researchers are investigating whether these attacks can be applied to so-called cloud computing situations. It's one thing to get a piece of malicious software installed on your personal computer (where you might find it easily), but what if you're sharing time on a server on the net? Attackers could run programs on shared servers that watch the cache on that server for other people's data. Just watch for busy servers and run your app when something good is going on, and you're none the wiser... Kind of scary stuff. Read all the details on MIT's news site.

How you feeling about your spyware security system now?