About this time last year, reports surfaced about security attacks on today’s most popular microprocessors (μPs). Researchers called them Meltdown, Spectre gaining widespread attention. Today, however, the industry and especially μP vendors have made some progress toward stemming these vulnerabilities. Here is my analysis as we enter into 2019.[…]

https://semiengineering.com/meltdown-and-spectre-one-year-later/

 

Training by Ass.Prof. Dr. Daniel Gruss, Moritz Lipp, Michael Schwarz (TU Graz)

With the beginning of 2018, microarchitectural attacks received a lot of attention by the computer security community and other fields. Meltdown and Spectre break isolation between processes and security domains on a hardware level. In this training, we provide a hands-on experience on microarchitectural attacks. Starting with the basics, we first learn how caches work and then implement three very basic microarchitectural side-channel attacks. We start with Flush+Reload and use it to implement two different attacks; one on a cryptographic algorithm and one template attack. We also see how performance counters can reveal interesting information for microarchitectural attacks. After having learned how to mount Flush+Reload attacks on shared libraries, we go one step further and get rid of the requirement of shared memory step by step. For this purpose, we learn how to build eviction sets and implement an Evict+Reload attack. Continuing from there, we implement Prime+Probe, an attack which does not require any shared memory. Finally, we implement a Meltdown and a Spectre attack, based on the Flush+Reload implementation we already have implement in the first third of the course. This course teaches attendees where microarchitectural attack surface is created and how it can be exploited. This provides engineers with valuable knowledge for building more secure hardware and software resilient to these attacks.

https://www.ruhrsec.de/2019/index.html#talks

https://gruss.cc/

https://meltdownattack.com/

https://ics-cert.us-cert.gov/alerts/ICS-ALERT-18-011-01

Welcome to our second School on Security & Correctness in the Internet of Things 2018, held from 3.-9. September. It is hosted by the research center “Dependable Internet of Things“, located at Graz University of Technology. This school targets graduate students interested in security aspects of tomorrow’s IoT devices. Current advances in technology drive miniaturization and efficiency of computing devices, opening a variety of novel use cases like autonomous transportation, smart cities and health monitoring devices. However, device malfunction could potentially threaten human welfare or even life. Malfunction might not only be caused by design errors but also by intentional impairment. As computing devices are supposed to have high and permanent network connectivity, an attacker finding a vulnerability might easily target millions of devices at once. Moreover, integration of computing devices in everyday items exposes them to a potentially hostile physical environment. A central requirement of tomorrow’s IoT is the ability to execute software dependably on all kinds of devices. IoT devices need to provide security in the presence of network attacks as well as against attackers having physical access to the device. During the five-day school, participants will gain awareness of these IoT-related challenges. Introductory classes are supplemented by advanced courses in the area of system security, cryptography as well as software and hardware side-channels. During spare time participants are invited to enjoy the city of Graz and attend organized events.

https://www.securityweek.at/school/

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/security-center/advisory/intel-sa-00115.html

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/security-center/advisory/intel-sa-00115.html

https://www.us-cert.gov/ncas/alerts/TA18-141A

https://www.us-cert.gov/ncas/alerts/TA18-004A

https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/srd/2018/05/21/analysis-and-mitigation-of-speculative-store-bypass-cve-2018-3639/