RETBLEED: New Spectre-BTI Attack (ETH Zurich)


New Spectre-BTI attack that "leaks arbitrary kernel memory." It's detailed in this research paper titled “RETBLEED: Arbitrary Speculative Code Execution with Return Instructions” from researchers at ETH Zürich. Mitigations are available. Abstract "Modern operating systems rely on software defenses against hardware attacks. These defenses are, however, as good as the assumptions they m... » read more

What Future Processors Will Look Like


Mark Papermaster, CTO at AMD, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about architectural changes that are required as the benefits of scaling decrease, including chiplets, new standards for heterogeneous integration, and different types of memory. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: What does a processor look like in five years? Is it a bunch of chips in a package? I... » read more

Security Risks Widen With Commercial Chiplets


The commercialization of chiplets is expected to increase the number and breadth of attack surfaces in electronic systems, making it harder to keep track of all the hardened IP jammed into a package and to verify its authenticity and robustness against hackers. Until now this has been largely a non-issue, because the only companies using chiplets today — AMD, Intel, and Marvell — interna... » read more

Hertzbleed: A New Family of Side-Channel Attacks–Root Case: Dynamic Frequency Scaling


  New research paper titled "Hertzbleed: Turning Power Side-Channel Attacks Into Remote Timing Attacks on x86" from researchers at UT Austin, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) and University of Washington can be found here. (preprint). This paper will be presented at the 31st USENIX Security Symposium (Boston, 10–12 August 2022). Summary explanation of the Hertzbleed ... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


IP, design Arm unveiled a number of new CPUs and GPUs. Based on the Armv9 architecture, the Cortex-X3 aims to improve single-threaded performance and targets a range of benchmarks and applications. The Cortex-A715 focuses on efficient performance, delivering a 20% energy efficiency gain and 5% performance uplift compared to Cortex-A710. In addition, the Cortex-A510 and DSU-110 were updated to ... » read more

Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing


Automotive, mobility The Lancet’s Road Safety 2022 report estimates that 1.35 million people die every year from road traffic injuries, with more than 50 million injured or disabled. Low-income and middle-income countries (LMICs) have the most deaths, accounting for 93% of the world's fatalities on roads. The four main risk factors for road injuries are speeding, impaired driving (drunk driv... » read more

Risks Rise As Robotic Surgery Goes Mainstream


As robotic-assisted surgery moves into the mainstream, so do concerns about security breaches, latency, and system performance. In the operating room, every second is critical, and technology failures or delays can be life-threatening. Robotic-assisted surgery (RAS) has around for a couple decades, but it is becoming more prevalent and significantly more complex. The technology often include... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


RISC-V RISC-V International announced four new specification and extension approvals. Efficient Trace for RISC-V defines an approach to processor tracing that uses a branch trace. RISC-V Supervisor Binary Interface architects a firmware layer between the hardware platform and the operating system kernel using an application binary interface in supervisor mode to enable common platform services... » read more

Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing


Automotive, mobility The U.S. Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) published a notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) to change the regulations on event data recorders (EDRs) to extend the EDR recording period for “timed data metrics from 5 seconds of pre-crash data at a frequency of 2 Hz to 20 seconds of pre-crash data at a frequency of 10 Hz... » read more

Why Hardware-Dependent Software Is So Critical


Hardware and software are two sides of the same coin, but they often live in different worlds. In the past, hardware and software rarely were designed together, and many companies and products failed because the total solution was unable to deliver. The big question is whether the industry has learned anything since then. At the very least, there is widespread recognition that hardware-depen... » read more

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