Computer simulation, programming, software, technology, research, and more (since 2007)
The 2024 DVCon (Design and Verification) Europe conference took place on October 15 and 16, in its traditional location at the Holiday Inn Munich City Centre. This year there was even more talk of artificial intelligence than last year, and quite a few sessions related to virtual platforms. And lots of other interesting presentations and discussions.
Continue reading “DVCon Europe 2024 – AI and More”
In August, a strange security vulnerability dubbed “Ghostwrite” was making the rounds in the press. Basically, a vector store instruction on an Alibaba T-Head C910 RISC-V-based processor would just write to a physical address without doing a virtual-to-physical translation or checking any kind of access rights. That is just totally weird. Just how could that be implemented and slip through testing???
Continue reading “Ghostwrite – Now This is Weird”
The new Windows 10 Controlled Folder Access (CFA) feature is a great idea – prevent unknown programs from modifying your files, to stop ransomware in its tracks. It is so good that I forced an early update to Windows 10 Build 1709 (“Fall Creators Update”) on a couple of my home machines and enabled it. Now, I have quickly disabled it, as it is not possible to actually use it in a real environment. It just stops things a bit too hard.
Continue reading “Windows 10 Controlled Folder Access – Good Idea, Implementation not Quite There”
Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX) is a pretty cool piece of technology that aims to make it possible for user programs to hide secrets from other user programs and the operating system itself. It establishes enclaves in the system that hides the data being processed and the code processing it from all other software. The original application for SGX was to support client-machine features like DRM, to create a safe space on a client that a server can trust. Recently, the people behind the Signal messaging system have provided a really interesting example of an application that makes use of the of SGX “in reverse”, to make it possible for a client to trust a server.
Continue reading “Signal Secure and Private Contacts Matching – Using SGX”
I read some news (ExtremeTech, Techcrunch) about how “smart” wifi-connected locks sold by Lockstate got bricked by an automatic over-the-network update. This sounds bad – but it is bad for a good reason. I think the company should be lauded for actually having the ability – and laughed out for royally botching it.
Continue reading “Smart Locks Bricked by Bad Update? The Right Approach!”
The Security Now Podcast number 497 dealt with the topic of Vehicle Hacking. It was fairly interesting, if a bit too light on the really interesting thing which is what actually went on in the vechicle hack that was apparently demonstrated on US national television at some point earlier this year (I guess this CBS News transcript fits the description). It was still good to hear the guys from the Galois consulting firm (Lee Pike and Pat Hickey) talking about what they did. Sobering to realize just how little even a smart guy like Steve Gibson really knows about embedded systems and the reality of their programming. Embedded software really is pretty invisible in both a good way and a bad way.
Continue reading “Security Now on Hacking Vehicles – A Bit of Let-Down”
In a paper from USENIX 2007 by Microsoft Researchers Onur Mutlu and Thomas Moscibroda present a working “denial of service” attack for multicore processors. The idea is simple: since there is no fairness or security designed into current DRAM controllers, it is quite feasible for one program in a multicore system to hog almost all memory bandwidth and thus reduce or deny service to the others. There is no direct attack on software programs, just stealing the resources that they all need to share for all to work.
Continue reading “Multicore Denial-of-Service Attack”
The F-Secure weblog is one of my regular reads, and today they presented one of the coolest industry-academia items for a long time: F-Secure are teaching an entire course at the Helsinki University of Technology, called “Malware Analysis and Antivirus Technologies”. Kudos to F-Secure for the time and money that must have gone into doing that!
In a report from FTF Paris 2007, Info World makes some interesting comments on security and locking-down of mobile devices. Info World » Blog Archive » ‘Flat IP’ mobile networks face new security challenges:
Continue reading “FTF Paris: Debug connections threat to secure network devices”
The new version of Trango’s embedded “secure virtualizer” for the ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore is an interesting solution in that it directly applies virtualization technology to the issue of migrating solutions (complete software stacks) from single-core to multicore. The details are a bit sketchy in just how this is done, there is some hardware support in recent ARM architectures, but a little bit of adaptation of a guest OS using paravirtual techniques are likely not a blocker. It also touches on security, implemented using ARM’s trustzone technology. All in all, I think this is a typical example of something that we are going to see much more of.