Linux Security Primer: SELinux And SMACK Frameworks


With the increased expansion of the IoT, software developers are called upon to do more to protect their devices from malicious attacks. Building a secure system involves many components and layers of security. This paper offers an introductory review of two popular Linux security frameworks: SELinux and SMACK. Readers will gain an understanding of these two frameworks and when to best implemen... » read more

The Week In Review: IoT


Finance Santa Monica, Calif.-based Sixgill reports raising $27.9 million in its Series B round of private financing, led by DRW Venture Capital. Mobile Financial Partners participated in the round. The startup last year raised $6 million in its Series A funding, also led by DRW. The company offers the Sixgill Sense sensor data services platform, addressing applications in the Internet of Thing... » read more

Are You Designing The Right Product?


Development and production of SoCs is becoming more and more complex and expensive. And rightfully so, the semiconductor industry spends billions of dollars on verification efforts. Verification is about checking the design behaves per its specification, a process that is very important and well understood. Still, something can go terribly wrong because having a verified SoC does not guarant... » read more

Executive Insight: Aart de Geus


Aart de Geus, chairman and co-CEO of [getentity id="22035" e_name="Synopsys"], sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to discuss machine learning and big data, the race toward autonomous vehicles, systems vs. chips, software vs. hardware, and the future of EDA. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: The whole tech world is buzzing over data and how it gets used in areas such as... » read more

Extracting Maximum Performance From Hardware


The Arm DS-5 Streamline performance analyzer provides system performance metrics, software tracing, and statistical profiling to help engineers get the most performance from hardware and find important bottlenecks in software. The Raspberry Pi 3 is one of the easiest systems for learning Streamline, and a quad-core Cortex-A53 also makes it a good target for learning Linux development. Many o... » read more

Fuzz Testing Maturity Model


Fuzz testing is a highly effective technique for locating vulnerabilities in software. Malformed and unexpected inputs are delivered to the target software, and when failures occur, vulnerabilities have been located. Fuzzing is a widely recognized technique for improving the security, robustness, and safety of software. However, fuzzing is an open-ended pursuit—an infinite space problem. So, ... » read more

Exploiting The Java Deserialization Vulnerability


In the security industry, we know that operating on untrusted inputs is a significant area of risk; and for penetration testers and attackers, a frequent source of high-impact issues. Serialization is no exception to this rule, and attacks against serialization schemes are innumerable. Unfortunately, developers enticed by the efficiency and ease of reflection-based and native serialization cont... » read more

Hardware/Software Tipping Point


It doesn't matter if you believe [getkc id="74" comment="Moore's Law"] has ended or is just slowing down. It is becoming very clear that design in the future will be significant different than it is today. Moore's law allowed the semiconductor industry to reuse design blocks from previous designs, and these were helped along by a new technology node—even if it was a sub-optimal solution. I... » read more

Focus Shifts To System Quality


For the past decade, many semiconductor industry insiders predicted that software would take over the world and hardware would become commoditized. The pendulum seems to have stopped, and if anything, it is reversing course. Initial predictions were based on several advantages for software. First, software is easier to modify and patch. Second, universities turn out far more software develop... » read more

Verification And The IoT


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss what impact the IoT will have on the design cycle, with Christopher Lawless, director of external customer acceleration in [getentity id="22846" e_name="Intel"]'s Software Services Group; David Lacey, design and verification technologist at Hewlett Packard Enterprise; Jim Hogan, managing partner at Vista Ventures; Frank Schirrmeister, senior group d... » read more

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