The numbers of on this twitter poll are interesting:
I’ll be trying to avoid info on the Bloomberg story until something of substance shows up, there’s lots of mainstream media coverage of that story…
Author: hucktech
Hypervisor From Scratch – Part 4: Address Translation Using Extended Page Table (EPT)
ebcvm: EFI Byte Code Virtual Machine
Appears to be new implementation of a UEFI bytecode VM. Builds with a simple Makefile, for C11 *nix systems. No other docs, except: EFI Byte Code Virtual Machine
Microsoft Ephemeral OS: limited public preview
Last week at Microsoft Ignite, we launched Ultra SSD, a new industry leading high-performance disk type for IO intensive workloads. Adding to that, today we are delighted to share the limited preview of Ephemeral OS Disk, a new type of OS disk created directly on the host node, providing local disk performance and faster boot/reset time. Ephemeral OS Disk is supported for all virtual machines (VM) and virtual machine scale sets (VMSS). This offering is based on your feedback to provide a lower cost, higher performant OS disk for stateless applications, which enable them to quickly deploy the VMs and reset them to its original state.[…]
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/ephemeral-os-disk-limited-public-preview/
Announcing Ultra SSD – the next generation of Azure Disks technology (preview)
New Apple MacBook Pros prevented from non-Apple Independent Repair
https://twitter.com/jason_koebler/status/1047980723293093890
Failure to run Apple’s proprietary diagnostic software after a repair “will result in an inoperative system and an incomplete repair.”
more on SuperMicro Bloomberg story
SuperMicro response:
https://www.supermicro.com/newsroom/pressreleases/2018/press181004_Bloomberg.cfm
Apple response:
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2018/10/what-businessweek-got-wrong-about-apple/
Amazon.com response:
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/setting-the-record-straight-on-bloomberg-businessweeks-erroneous-article/
More info:
https://blog.senr.io/blog/impervious-implants-splintery-supply-chains
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/gye8w4/chinese-supply-chain-hack-apple-bloomberg
CHIPSEC adds LoJax to UEFI module blacklist
Re: https://firmwaresecurity.com/2018/09/27/apt28-malware-lojax-uses-uefi-rootkit/
the CHIPSEC tool has added this new UEFI malware to it’s blacklist.
https://github.com/chipsec/chipsec/commit/1ea5ea3c04f462201971160ca795e87511d65da8
Bloomberg: The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate U.S. Companies
The attack by Chinese spies reached almost 30 U.S. companies, including Amazon and Apple, by compromising America’s technology supply chain, according to extensive interviews with government and corporate sources.
[…]There are two ways for spies to alter the guts of computer equipment.
One, known as interdiction, consists of manipulating devices as they’re in transit from manufacturer to customer. This approach is favored by U.S. spy agencies, according to documents leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.
The other method involves seeding changes from the very beginning.[…]
https://twitter.com/qrs/status/1047788385425940480
https://twitter.com/qrs/status/1047788391939682309
Positive Technologies researcher finds vulnerability enabling disclosure of Intel ME encryption keys
Eclypsium on LoJax UEFI malware
Re: https://firmwaresecurity.com/2018/09/27/apt28-malware-lojax-uses-uefi-rootkit/, Eclypsium has a new blog post on this malware:
https://blog.eclypsium.com/2018/10/01/uefi-attacks-in-the-wild/
Brian on open source firmware
Brian Richardson of Intel has a new blog post, after the Open Source Firmware Conference, on open source firmware issues:
https://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2018/10/01/open-source-firmware-two-ends-of-the-spectrum
Open Source Firmware Conference: videos uploaded
UEFI workshops at BSidesPDX!
Exciting, there are two workshops at BSidesPDX in Portland Oregon next month:
Detecting Evil Maid Firmware Attacks
https://bsidespdx.org/events/2018/workshops.html#Evil%20Maid
UEFI and CHIPSEC development for Security Researchers
https://bsidespdx.org/events/2018/workshops.html#Chipsec
PS: If you’re in town, there’s also the Portland Retro Gaming Expo, starting a few days earlier:
https://www.oregoncc.org/events/2018/10/portland-retro-gaming-expo-2018
http://www.retrogamingexpo.com/
ACM SIG Arch: Reflections on trusting SGX
Reflections on trusting SGX
by Mark Silberstein
Sep 25, 2018
The security community will remember the year of 2018 as the year of speculative execution attacks. Meltdown and Spectre, the recent Foreshadow (L1TF in Intel’s terminology), and their variants demonstrate how the immense processor design complexity, perpetual drive for higher performance, and subtle hardware-software interactions — all collude to create a major system security earthquake that is shaking the whole industry. Foreshadow stands out in that it wreaks havoc on Intel SGX, Intel’s recent instruction set extension for building trusted execution environments, which has been envisioned as a stronghold of security in future computing systems. In this blog I highlight the important differences between Foreshadow and other speculative execution attacks, and raise a few questions that require much more than just a technical solution.[…]
GNU/HardenedLinux translates ‘Platform Firmware Security Defense…’ ebook to Chinese
The book “Platform Firmware Security Defense for Enterprise System Administrators and Blue Teams“, which Paul English of PreOS security wrote, introducing the concept of firmware security for the system administrator audience:
https://preossec.com/Newsletter-Q3-2018/
https://preossec.com/products/ebook-download
has been translated to Chinese, by the GNU Hardened Linux project!
more info:
https://hardenedlinux.github.io/
lojax_uefi_rootkit_checker: detect LoJax UEFI malware (on some HP ProLiant DLxxx systems)
Re: https://firmwaresecurity.com/2018/09/27/apt28-malware-lojax-uses-uefi-rootkit/
A new detection tool in Python3:
#Yalnizca ProLiant DL180 ve ProLiant DL360 tipi sunucular icin firmware kontrolune uygundur.
#This script performs firmware checks for only ProLiant DL180 and ProLiant DL360.
https://github.com/evgind/lojax_uefi_rootkit_checker
Vincent on recent UEFI presentations
Vincent has a new blog post, covering some of his recent tour of speaking engagements, with a bit on UEFI, and even some FSP humor.
http://vzimmer.blogspot.com/2018/09/east-and-further-east.html
HowToForge: Building and flashing a secured AOSP build with verified boot and separate lockscreen password for the Nexus 5X
[…]This tutorial aims to provide detailed instructions on how to solve these caveats, building and flashing AOSP for the Nexus 5X with verified boot and using separate lockscreen/encryption secrets.
Firmware Security 
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