Blog Review: Sept. 4


Synopsys' Taylor Armerding checks out Apple's newly expanded bug bounty program, with bounty payouts are increasing to compete with malicious actors, and why even with security-oriented development the practice of bug bounties will remain needed. Mentor's Colin Walls shares a few more embedded software tips, this time on external variables, delay loops in real time systems, and meaningful pa... » read more

Security’s Very Strange Path To Success


Security at the chip level appears to be heading toward a more promising future. The reason is simple—more people are willing to pay for security than in the past. For the most part, security is like insurance. You don't know it's working until something goes wrong, and you don't necessarily even know right away if there has been a breach. Sometimes it takes years to show up, because it ca... » read more

Meltdown, Spectre And Foreshadow


Ben Levine, senior director of product management for Rambus’ Security Division, talks with Semiconductor Engineering about hardware-specific attacks, why they are so dangerous, and how they work. » read more

Diary Of A Heartbleed


The Heartbleed vulnerability affects how OpenSSL implements the heartbeat protocol in TLS. In computing, a heartbeat, or a simple data message, typically determines the persistence of another machine in a given transaction; in this case, a heartbeat determines the persistence of the encryption between a client and a server. In this case, Heartbleed allows an attacker to request data more than a... » read more

System Bits: March 28


Automating biology experiments with adapted Lego kit To bring more of the features of modern biology labs — that often use robotic assemblies to drop precise amounts of fluids into experimental containers — to students and teachers, Stanford University researchers have shown how an off-the-shelf Lego kit can be modified to create inexpensive automated systems to do this in clubs or classro... » read more

Unexpected Security Holes


Security is emerging as one of the top challenges in semiconductor design across a variety of markets, with the number of security holes growing by orders of magnitude in sectors that have never dealt with these kinds of design constraints before. While security has been a topic of conversation for years in mobile phones and data centers, commercial and industrial equipment is being connecte... » read more

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