You have to be running process explorer (if that is what you are using) as an administrator group user to be able to see if DEP/ASLR is being used, there are by all accounts differences in what OS you are using, XP or Vista, etc.
See image example from process explorer, first part of the image if Vista and the second part is XP, the third part relates to ASLR for avast .dlls and is on Vista as I don’t believe ASLR is available with XP.
So Vista avastUI doesn’t appear to be running DEP, yet on my XP Pro system avastUI it is running under DEP, I don’t know why this is as the Vista images have been captured from another location as I don’t use Vista.
so many antivirus programs did not use either DEP or ASLR, also AVAST Home Edition. Whats with other AVAST programs? Did you plan to integrate this feature in future AVAST Home?
To clarify for you, the version you have is now called the Avast Free version (5.0.594). As for answering your question, there have been some responses above in the thread. Should you want additional responses, you are welcome to contact Avast: http://www.avast.com/contacts for further clarification if you are having a technical issue that requires a ticket.
Many of us suspect that the report relates to avast 4.8 Home and since avast 5.0 there is no avast Home, but avast Free, so the terminology is a key factor here as that is the only indication as to what version was used in the test.
If you expand the image I posted you will see that in the case of avast 5.0 on XP or Vista there are certainly areas where avast is using DEP and in some cases ASLR also.
There is however some disparity even between the same OS XP SP3 as some are showing DEP used yet others aren’t. Now as far as I’m aware DEP is also hardware dependant and I don’t know if AMD processors are fully DEP enabled. There is also that wrinkle about what analysis tool you are using (process explorer) and if you are running it as Admin, etc. So those may be other areas where there will be disparity between different user systems.
If you play with the Process Explorer, ‘Process’ column heading you will see some differences in the results as the column (my small image attachment), aside from changing the ordering it is also a toggle for different views.
So why my system with the same OS, XP Pro SP3 and avast 5.0 free shows DEP for both avastUI and avastSvc yet yours doesn’t is beyond me.
Modern processors incorporate features beneficial to
security. SecurAble displays the status of the three
most significant security-related processor features:
SecurAble probes the system’s processor to determine the presence, absence and operational status of three modern processor features:
* 64-bit instruction extensions,
* Hardware support for detecting and preventing
the execution of code in program data areas, ... and
* Hardware support for system resource “virtualization.”</blockquote>
That’s a pretty old tool just over two years old, ancient in terms of processor development so I though it wouldn’t recognise the later AMD/Intel CPUs; though it does seem to do that.