Intel, Center for Cybersecurity Policy and Law start Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure Practices for Hardware

WASHINGTON, April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ — Today, the Center for Cybersecurity Policy and Law announced a new cybersecurity effort to examine coordinated vulnerability disclosure policy and processes specific to hardware.

Coordinated disclosure is widely regarded as the best way to responsibly protect users from security exploits. Led by Ari Schwartz, the Center’s coordinator, the project will bring together business leaders, policymakers and other stakeholders from across the technology sector to identify specific disclosure needs in the hardware ecosystem, assess the current in disclosure policy and practice and describe options for collaboration and improvements. “As recent threats have shown, the need for industrywide coordination and response to new vulnerabilities has never been greater,” said Schwartz. “We are looking forward to engaging with a wide range of players to help improve resiliency in the hardware ecosystem.” […]

https://centerforcybersecuritypolicy.org/

https://blogs.intel.com/policy/2018/04/12/furthering-intels-security-first-pledge-with-cybersecurity-public-policy/

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/center-for-cybersecurity-policy-and-law-to-engage-with-industry-on-coordinated-vulnerability-disclosure-practices-for-hardware-300629040.html

What about the other chip makers beyond Intel?

PFSExtractor-RS: Rust port of PFSExtractor: extract contents of Dell BIOS update files in PFS format

Nikolaj is learning Rust. He just rewrote one C tool to Rust:

https://github.com/LongSoft/PFSExtractor-RS

EFI-CI: Red Hat team’s build CI for EFI-related tools

This repo contains the tools to build images to run CI for the Red Hat bootloader team’s EFI tools. This build includes all of the dependencies of the build as well as the testing infrastructure, to minimize the time spent per Travis build. Each repo has a .travis.yml will install this docker image, fetch and build any prerequisites, and build that repo using whatever branch travis specifies.

https://github.com/rhboot/efi-ci

Intel: Persistent Memory

Intel has 2 new Persistent Memory updates last month, a new dev kit and a white paper on the topic:

https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/enhancing-high-performance-computing-with-persistent-memory-technology

https://software.intel.com/en-us/videos/persistent-memory-programming-tools

https://github.com/pmem/pmdk

 

The Persistent Memory Development Kit (PMDK), formerly known as NVML, is a growing collection of libraries which have been developed for various use cases, tuned, validated to production quality, and thoroughly documented.
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AMD: Spectre Mitigation Update

Spectre Mitigation Update
4/10/18

Today, AMD is providing updates regarding our recommended mitigations for Google Project Zero (GPZ) Variant 2 (Spectre) for Microsoft Windows users. These mitigations require a combination of processor microcode updates from our OEM and motherboard partners, as well as running the current and fully up-to-date version of Windows. For Linux users, AMD recommended mitigations for GPZ Variant 2 were made available to our Linux partners and have been released to distribution earlier this year.[…]

https://www.amd.com/en/corporate/security-updates

Click to access Architecture_Guidelines_Update_Indirect_Branch_Control.pdf

https://www.amd.com/en/corporate/security-updates#paragraph-347856

Bad Ducky: Rubber Ducky compatible clone based on CJMCU BadUSB HW

The below articles point to related tools, besides the Hak5 Rubber Ducky.

https://github.com/mharjac/bad_ducky

https://twitter.com/anonymous9396/status/983165816160972806

https://www.kitploit.com/2018/04/bad-ducky-rubber-ducky-compatible-clone.html

https://www.digitalmunition.me/2018/04/bad-ducky-rubber-ducky-compatible-clone-based-cjmcu-badusb-hw/

See-also:

https://ducktoolkit.com/viewscript/all/

https://github.com/hak5darren/USB-Rubber-Ducky/wiki/Payloads

USB Rubber Ducky

 

uefi.tech mirroring uefi.org’s fw_os_forum mailing list postings

[[UPDATE: It appears uefi.tech has changed their policy regarding scraping list postings. They have updated their site.]]

Re: https://firmwaresecurity.com/2018/04/09/new-uefi-centric-web-site-uefi-tech-uefitech/

I don’t know who is behind this new UEFI web site. The site is scraping postings from the UEFI Forum’s public mailing list, FW_OS_Forum and adding them to their web board, automatically adding the poster to their site, making it look like people who are posting to the FW_OS_Forum list are also posting on the uefi.tech forum.

For example:
http://lists.mailman.uefi.org/pipermail/fw_os_forum/20180409/000068.html
http://www.uefi.tech/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=11&p=67&sid=cfcbd9ed0310915eaf2e397f1b978e8f#p67

http://www.uefi.org/FWOSForum

3mdeb: Minnowboard Turbot remote firmware flashing with RTE (Remote Testing Environment)

Minnowboard Turbot remote firmware flashing with RTE (Remote Testing Environment)
April 5, 2018
Arek Cichocki

Work related to a hardware carries some restrictions which don’t occur when working only with a software. One of them is a limited number of devices. This one may cause a problem with a accessibility to the platform. The limited number of users could slow development and testing. What is more work with a hardware requires a minimal knowledge of the theory of circuits and signals to eliminate platform damage by a user. Hardware can be expensive too. Remote Testing Environment project was made to resolve mentioned problems. […]

https://3mdeb.com/firmware/minnowboard-turbot-remote-firmware-flashing-with-rte-remote-testing-environment/

Scaleway: open source BIOS at Scale (part 2)

Re: https://firmwaresecurity.com/2018/03/15/scaleway-open-source-bios-at-scale/

A look from behind the Open Source Bios

This is a followup post of Open Source Bios at Scale so you might want to read it first as this post will get more into details. As explained in the previous post our BIOS is build with three main components: coreboot, Intel FSP and TianoCore. We will describe here how those three parts are fitting together.[…]

https://blog.online.net/2018/04/10/a-look-from-behind-the-open-source-bios/

Post image

Linux UEFI Validation (LUV) v2.3-rc1 released

Megha Dey of Intel has announced the latest release of LUV, with multiple new features and bugfixes by multiple contributors:

Gayatri Kammela (12), Megha Dey (9), Naresh Bhat (3), Ricardo Neri (22),  Sai Praneeth (5)

It mostly includes updates to yocto, meta-oe, various test suites and kernel version and bug fixes. We have also added a feature to display the severity of failed test cases. Since we had the stable v2.2 release 2 months back, it made sense to have this release as rc1 of v2.3 to allow stabilization towards the next release cycle.

Main new feature: Display the severity of failed test cases In this release, Ricardo submitted 2 patchsets to display the severity of failed test cases. This is a valuable addition as LUV now ships with 7 different test suites. Some test suites include hundreds of test cases. Thus, we could possibly have tens of failed test cases, which can be overwhelming. In order to help users to decide on which failed test cases focus their attention, it is useful to indicate the severity of failed test cases.

See the full announcement for list of bugfixes.

https://download.01.org/linux-uefi-validation/v2.3/
https://lists.01.org/mailman/listinfo/luv

4th annual Hardwear.io: CfP open

https://hardwear.io/the-hague-2018/cfp.php

New UEFI-centric web site: uefi.tech (@uefitech)

Unclear who created this site, but if you are looking for UEFI resources here is a new web site:

There’s even a ‘web board’ on Firmware Security:

http://www.uefi.tech/viewforum.php?f=7&sid=368672e20c14a5429658f2c541f594c4

This is a peroiodic reminder that any link I point to may not be secure, use proper online security when accessing any new resource.

 

ARM: documents CSDB (Consumption of Speculative Data Barrier) instruction

Hmm, I can’t find the updated docs that Igor mentions above.

https://developer.arm.com/support/security-update/latest-news/cache-speculation-issues-update

http://infocenter.arm.com/help/index.jsp?topic=/com.arm.doc.ddi0406c/index.html

https://alastairreid.github.io/natural-specs/
https://alastairreid.github.io/ARM-v8a-xml-release/
https://alastairreid.github.io/dissecting-ARM-MRA/
https://alastairreid.github.io/arm-v8_3/
https://developer.arm.com/products/architecture/a-profile/exploration-tools

Intel seeks BIOS/UEFI Tools Developer

BIOS-UEFI Firmware Tools Engineer

As BIOS-UEFI Firmware Tools Engineer you will develop tools and scripts needed for build and test automation infrastructure that is the backbone of the the Continuous Integration process in Intel’s Data Center UEFI firmware BIOS team.[…]

https://jobs.intel.com/ShowJob/Id/1573600/BIOS%20UEFI%20Firmware%20Tools%20Engineer

PS: I need to figure out a way to get some swag/etc from jobs that’re filled via this blog. ;-(

PS: Intel HR: spaces in URLs is generally frowned upon.