Language Selection

English French German Italian Portuguese Spanish

Security and Hardware

Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Sunday 2nd of May 2021 05:56:48 PM Filed under
Hardware
Security
  • UVA Engineering Computer Scientists Discover New Vulnerability Affecting Computers Globally

    A team of University of Virginia School of Engineering computer science researchers has uncovered a line of attack that breaks all Spectre defenses, meaning that billions of computers and other devices across the globe are just as vulnerable today as they were when Spectre was first announced. The team reported its discovery to international chip makers in April and will present the new challenge at a worldwide computing architecture conference in June.

    The researchers, led by Ashish Venkat, William Wulf Career Enhancement Assistant Professor of Computer Science at UVA Engineering, found a whole new way for hackers to exploit something called a “micro-op cache,” which speeds up computing by storing simple commands and allowing the processor to fetch them quickly and early in the speculative execution process. Micro-op caches have been built into Intel computers manufactured since 2011.

  • Computer scientists discover new vulnerability affecting computers globally

    Because all current Spectre defenses protect the processor in a later stage of speculative execution, they are useless in the face of Venkat's team's new attacks. Two variants of the attacks the team discovered can steal speculatively accessed information from Intel and AMD processors.

    "Intel's suggested defense against Spectre, which is called LFENCE, places sensitive code in a waiting area until the security checks are executed, and only then is the sensitive code allowed to execute," Venkat said. "But it turns out the walls of this waiting area have ears, which our attack exploits. We show how an attacker can smuggle secrets through the micro-op cache by using it as a covert channel."

  • CVE-2021-31799: A command injection vulnerability in RDoc

    There is a vulnerability about Command Injection in RDoc which is bundled in Ruby. It is recommended that all Ruby users update RDoc to the latest version that fixes this issue.

    [...]

    RDoc used to call Kernel#open to open a local file. If a Ruby project has a file whose name starts with | and ends with tags, the command following the pipe character is executed. A malicious Ruby project could exploit it to run an arbitrary command execution against a user who attempts to run rdoc command.

  • HowTo: Using a Pager in the 21st Century | by Dmitrii Eliuseev | May, 2021 | Medium

    In the 90th I was a student and the pager for me was something like a Star Trek Communicator, a piece of the cutting edge technology. It is fun to remember it because now I know that technologically the paging protocol is very straightforward. From the encoding perspective, the pager is not so different from the wireless doorbells that are selling now for 5$ in Aliexpress.

    [...]

    Bits are encoded with a frequency shift keying (FSK) modulation using 9 kHz bandwidth and 1200 bits per second speed, all this message is transmitting in about 0.5s.

    Looks simple, and it really is. I will skip the details, those who are interested can read the protocol specification. It is even easy to draw all these bits with pen and paper — these protocols were simple in the past, I think nobody can do it with modern GSM or WiFi. In POCSAG messages there is no authentication, no security keys — all messages to all paging company customers are available on-air “as is”, and by the way, can be easily decoded with PC software like PDW.

    How customers are receiving their messages? Every pager has its own unique ID, called CAP — Channel Access Protocol or RIC — Receiver Identification Code. All pagers from the paging provider are listening to the same frequency, let’s say, 164 MHz. If the message code is equal to the pager code, the pager saves the message and makes the loud “beep”. That’s it. It’s a one-way communication, there is no confirmation sending back, the pager has only the receiver and no transmitter at all. The logic and hardware are extremely simple, and because of that, the pager can work for more than a month from a single AAA battery. Interestingly, pagers are still in use in some countries even now — in the hospitals or emergency services, where it is important to have a portable and lightweight device with long battery life.

»

More in Tux Machines

digiKam 7.7.0 is released

After three months of active maintenance and another bug triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.7.0 of its open source digital photo manager. See below the list of most important features coming with this release. Read more

Dilution and Misuse of the "Linux" Brand

Samsung, Red Hat to Work on Linux Drivers for Future Tech

The metaverse is expected to uproot system design as we know it, and Samsung is one of many hardware vendors re-imagining data center infrastructure in preparation for a parallel 3D world. Samsung is working on new memory technologies that provide faster bandwidth inside hardware for data to travel between CPUs, storage and other computing resources. The company also announced it was partnering with Red Hat to ensure these technologies have Linux compatibility. Read more

today's howtos

  • How to install go1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04 – NextGenTips

    In this tutorial, we are going to explore how to install go on Ubuntu 22.04 Golang is an open-source programming language that is easy to learn and use. It is built-in concurrency and has a robust standard library. It is reliable, builds fast, and efficient software that scales fast. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel-type systems enable flexible and modular program constructions. Go compiles quickly to machine code and has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. In this guide, we are going to learn how to install golang 1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04. Go 1.19beta1 is not yet released. There is so much work in progress with all the documentation.

  • molecule test: failed to connect to bus in systemd container - openQA bites

    Ansible Molecule is a project to help you test your ansible roles. I’m using molecule for automatically testing the ansible roles of geekoops.

  • How To Install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9 - idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, MongoDB is a high-performance, highly scalable document-oriented NoSQL database. Unlike in SQL databases where data is stored in rows and columns inside tables, in MongoDB, data is structured in JSON-like format inside records which are referred to as documents. The open-source attribute of MongoDB as a database software makes it an ideal candidate for almost any database-related project. This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the MongoDB NoSQL database on AlmaLinux 9. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

  • An introduction (and how-to) to Plugin Loader for the Steam Deck. - Invidious
  • Self-host a Ghost Blog With Traefik

    Ghost is a very popular open-source content management system. Started as an alternative to WordPress and it went on to become an alternative to Substack by focusing on membership and newsletter. The creators of Ghost offer managed Pro hosting but it may not fit everyone's budget. Alternatively, you can self-host it on your own cloud servers. On Linux handbook, we already have a guide on deploying Ghost with Docker in a reverse proxy setup. Instead of Ngnix reverse proxy, you can also use another software called Traefik with Docker. It is a popular open-source cloud-native application proxy, API Gateway, Edge-router, and more. I use Traefik to secure my websites using an SSL certificate obtained from Let's Encrypt. Once deployed, Traefik can automatically manage your certificates and their renewals. In this tutorial, I'll share the necessary steps for deploying a Ghost blog with Docker and Traefik.

More on Tux Machines: About ● Gallery ● Forum ● Blogs ● Search ● News ● RSS Feed

Part of Bytes Media ● Sister sites below.

TechBytes Techrights button

Powered by Drupal, an open source content management system

Content available under CC-BY-SA CC

© by original authors

Powered by CentOS 6.5 (GNU/Linux), Varnish, and Drupal 6