France in December!
Month: August 2018
Kees Cook: Making C Less Dangerous [for the Linux kernel]
Facebook releases Bowler, Python refactoring tool
ZeroNights CFP open
HITB-GSEC presentations online
HITB-GSEC is happening, slides are uploaded in near real-time, day 1 presentations are up:
https://twitter.com/HITBGSEC/status/1034984965308440576
Genode 18.08 released
The latest release of the Genode OS has changes to microcode updates, as well as other firmware-related interface changes.
https://genode.org/documentation/release-notes/18.08#New_Intel_Microcode_update_mechanism
DarkRISCV, an open source RISC-V core for FPGAs
Booting the Mac: bless, and what makes a volume bootable
The last piece in the puzzle that is the booting of a Mac is understanding how any given volume is made bootable, and how it can be made the next startup volume.[…]
c-efi – UEFI Reference Specification Protocol Constants and Definitions
The c-efi project provides the protocol constants and definitions of the UEFI Reference Specification as native C11 code. The scope of this project is limited to those protocol definitions. The protocols are not actually implemented. As such, this project serves as base for any UEFI application that needs to interact with UEFI, or implement (parts of) the UEFI specification. Additionally to providing a C library, this project also serves as documentation base for UEFI programming in C. It provides target-triples for UEFI, bootstrap helpers, and a bunch of documentation how to get started.
https://github.com/c-util/c-efi
Heardwear.io 2018 schedule posted
Multiple sources of firmware security training!
AArch64-UEFI-LLVM-HelloWorld: uses GNU-EFI and CLang on ARM
https://github.com/tnishinaga/aarch64-uefi-llvm_helloworld
UEFI HelloWorld application with clang + lld + gnu-efi(header only)
This is a nonstandard build environment for UEFI, using GNU-EFI with clang (not efi-clang) on ARM not Intel. Last time I looked, GNU-EFI was Intel-centric and GCC-centric, so this is impressive.
Tianocore UEFI hackathon
https://github.com/tianocore/tianocore.github.io/wiki/2018-EDK-II-Capsule-Hack-a-thon
“This is the first time Intel has staged a public TianoCore hack-a-thon event.”
miasm-bootloader: Bootloader emulation with Miasm (case of NotPetya)
efi-devel – UEFI Development Utilities for developers using Meson
This new hello-world UEFI application project is interesting in that it uses Meson to build UEFI binaries.
Two TPM vulnerabilities: CVE-2017-16837 and CVE-2018-6622
coreboot user group in Berlin this Thursday
Intel ME JTAG PoC for INTEL-SA-00086
Vulnerability INTEL-SA-00086 allows to activate JTAG for Intel Management Engine core. We developed our JTAG PoC for the Gigabyte Brix GP-BPCE-3350C platform. Although we recommend that would-be researchers use the same platform, other manufacturers’ platforms with the Intel Apollo Lake chipset should support the PoC as well (for TXE version 3.0.1.1107).[…]
https://github.com/ptresearch/IntelTXE-PoC
Spectre & Meltdown vulnerability/mitigation checker for Linux
A shell script to tell if your system is vulnerable against the several “speculative execution” CVEs that were made public in 2018.
CVE-2017-5753 [bounds check bypass] aka ‘Spectre Variant 1’
CVE-2017-5715 [branch target injection] aka ‘Spectre Variant 2’
CVE-2017-5754 [rogue data cache load] aka ‘Meltdown’ aka ‘Variant 3’
CVE-2018-3640 [rogue system register read] aka ‘Variant 3a’
CVE-2018-3639 [speculative store bypass] aka ‘Variant 4’
CVE-2018-3615, CVE-2018-3620, CVE-2018-3646 [L1 terminal fault] aka ‘Foreshadow & Foreshadow-
https://www.cnx-software.com/2018/08/17/check-spectre-meltdown-l1-terminal-fault-linux/amp/
Booting the Mac: Visual Summary
This article provides a simplified visual summary of the various stages which take place when a modern Intel Mac starts up in macOS 10.12 or 10.13, from pressing the Power button through to running the kernel and its extensions.[…]
What’s stored in Mac NVRAM?
NVRAM stores key settings which your Mac cannot obtain from disk during startup. Variables vary according to the model, version of macOS, and EFI firmware in use. Included among these are the following:[…]
Firmware Security 
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