Meltdown and Spectre on PC Engines apu2
Published at May 29, 2019 · Michał Żygowski · 9 min read
As a continuation the Meltdown and Spectre blog post, this post present the vulnerability status and mitigation with microcode update on PC Engines apu2. Read the post and get to know the open source tools for vulnerability and mitigation checks, as well as exploiting proof of concepts....
Published at May 22, 2019 · Krystian Hebel · 3 min read
Recently we made sure that every build of PC Engines' firmware is built in a reproducible manner. This short post shows what exactly does it mean and why this should be important to firmware developers....
Categories: firmware
Building and running Bareflank
Published at May 15, 2019 · Krystian Hebel · 13 min read
In this second post of a series, we will build and start our first hypervisor. It won't do much just yet, but it is good to get known with its build system....
Categories: firmware
Published at May 8, 2019 · Łukasz Wcisło · 4 min read
RTE used to control tested devices could be used as a programmer. But RTE doesn't have SWD interface, which is crucial. We tried to walk around this using Bit Banging method....
Categories: firmware manufacturing miscellaneous
5 terms every hypervisor developer should know
Published at April 30, 2019 · Krystian Hebel · 11 min read
This is the first post of a series about developing bare-metal hypervisors. It introduces to Intel's VMX technology, describes interactions between a virtual machine and a hypervisor as well as gives some insight on the control structures required. This post should give some theoretical knowledge base required for the next ones, in which we will implement a basic hypervisor....
Categories: firmware
Published at April 24, 2019 · Łukasz Wcisło · 11 min read
OpenVizsla allows to passively monitor the communication between a USB host and USB peripheral. It is a tool for developers working with USB and especially those who are using USB in embedded designs. We have tested its possible use cases and see it is really valuable, and has a lot of potential for further development....
Categories: miscellaneous security
How to mitigate ROCA TPM vulnerability?
Published at April 17, 2019 · Krystian Hebel · 10 min read
ROCA vulnerability was discovered (October 2017) in a software library, RSALib, provided by Infineon Technologies. That library is also used in TPM modules. When this vulnerability is present, a pair of prime numbers used for generating RSA keys is chosen from a small subset of all available prime numbers. This results in a great loss of entropy. Details and exact numbers can be found here. UPDATE 2021-10-20: provided new link for TPM firmware updates (old one was no longer working), added info about patch for openssl-1....
Meltdown and spectre. What are they and what they are not?
Published at March 20, 2019 · Michał Żygowski · 6 min read
Meltdown and Spectre At the turn of the year 2017 and 2018, the world of security and computing has shaken. It was the time when we first heard about vulnerabilities that affect almost every modern processor (mainly x86 architecture) manufactured during the last 20 years. They have been named as Meltdown and Spectre and belong to one family of flaws caused by speculative execution. In this post, I will describe what they are and how they are threatening the users of modern machines....
Categories: security
Yocto meta-rte is now open for everyone
Published at March 13, 2019 · Marta Szelecka · 3 min read
Yocto meta-rte is now open for everyone We are happy to announce that our 3mdeb’s Yocto meta-rte is now available on our GitHub. But let’s say briefly what the Yocto Project is and why we decided to work with it. First of all, like everything that we love the most, Yocto Project is open sourced. The project is hosted by the Linux Foundation and gives you templates, methods, and set of interoperable tools for creating OS images for embedded Linux systems....
Categories: os-dev
Flashing eMMC on Hummingboard Edge using fastboot? part 2
Published at March 8, 2019 · Maciej Pijanowski · 11 min read
Second part of the HummingBoard Edge flashing guide with the help of fastboot tool. In this post we will get acquainted with U-Boot configuration and fastboot client and try to boot our platform from DRAM, SD card and finally EMMC....
.png){kind=small}
