Intel Tiger Lake CPUs to come with Anti-Malware Protection

Intel’s Tiger Lake CPUs will come with Control-flow Enforcement Technology (CET), aimed at battling common control-flow hijacking attacks.

Intel’s upcoming class of mobile CPUs, code named “Tiger Lake,” will feature a long anticipated security layer, called Control-flow Enforcement Technology (CET), which aims to protect against common malware attacks.

CET protects against attacks on processors’ control flow, which refers to the order in which different functions calls are executed. Previously, attackers have targeted control flow in attacks where they hijack the processes and modify the instructions. This could potentially allow them to execute arbitrary code on victims’ systems.

“Intel CET delivers CPU-level security capabilities to help protect against common malware attack methods that have been a challenge to mitigate with software alone,” said Tom Garrison, vice president and general manager of Client Security Strategy and Initiatives with Intel, in a Monday post. “These types of attack methods are part of a class of malware referred to as memory-safety issues, and include tactics such as the corruption of stack buffer overflow and use-after-free.”

Intel’s upcoming Tiger Lake CPUs (which were first announced in January) are the first to come equipped with Intel CET, which will battle control-flow hijacking attacks by adding two types of protection.

The first is Indirect Branch Tracking (IBT), which defends against attacks called call-oriented programming or jump-oriented programming (COP and JOP). These types of code-reuse attacks occur when short code sequences that end in specific call and jump instructions are located and chained into a specific order, in order to execute attackers’ payloads. IBT prevents this by creating a new instruction, ENDBRANCH, which tracks all indirect call and jump instructions to detect any control-flow violations.

The second protection is shadow stack (SS). Shadow stack helps to defend against return-oriented programming (ROP) attacks. These types of attacks center around return instructions in a control flow, which are intended to fetch the address of the next instruction from the stack, and execute instructions from that address. In ROP attacks, an attacker abuses these return instructions to stitch together a malicious code flow.

Shadow stack (separate from the data stack) prevents this by adding return address protection. When shadow stacks are enabled, the CALL instruction on a processor pushes the return address on both the data stack and shadow stack and make sure that they match.

“JOP or ROP attacks can be particularly hard to detect or prevent because the attacker uses existing code running from executable memory in a creative way to change program behavior,” Baiju Patel, fellow with Intel’s client computing group, said. “What makes it hard to detect or prevent ROP/JOP is the fact that attacker uses existing code running from executable memory. Many software-based detection and prevention techniques have been developed and deployed with limited success.”

Intel published the first specification of CET in 2016. Various software makers have added support for the technology into their products, including Microsoft in its Hardware-enforced Stack Protection for Windows.

While CET is launching for Intel’s mobile lineup, the technology will soon be available on desktop and server platforms, according to Garrison. The chip giant is now preparing for volume production of its Tiger Lake chipset, and expects to being shipping the processors to OEMs mid-year.

Source: Threatpost

Lamphone attack recovers secretive conversations via hanging light bulb

Lamphone attack allowed researchers to recover conversations from a distance of 25 meters (82 feet).

Earlier this year it was reported that hackers can exploit a critical vulnerability in Philips smart light bulbs to spread malware. Now, scientists at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel, and Weizmann Institute of Science have identified that it is possible to use a light bulb’s vibration patterns and evaluate the amount of light emitted to spy on secret conversations from a remote location.

The spying can be conducted simply by observing a hanging light bulb visible from a window in the room. 

Scientists Ben Nassi, Yaron Pirutin, Adi Shamir, Yuval Elovici, and Boris Zadov claim that the hanging bulb is the key to this attack, which they have dubbed “Lamphone” attack because it serves as a diaphragm and a transducer.

This means a hanging light bulb can be used by secret agents and spies to eavesdrop on confidential conversations by detecting vibrations from the bulb that result from naturally occurring air pressure fluctuations when sound waves hit its surface. By measuring the changes in the hanging bulb’s output, snippets of conversations can be picked up including music.

The researchers based their research on the principle that objects vibrate when sound waves hit their surface. They used a setup comprising of a telescope to get a close-up view of the room where the light bulb was present, and an electro-optical sensor mounted on the telescope.

The purpose of the sensor was to convert light into electrical current, that is, to transform the analog output to a digital signal. 

Furthermore, by using a laptop researchers could process the incoming optical signals and recovered sound data. By using powerful sensors, the researchers noted, it was possible to record the light variations, and the sound waves hitting the light bulb could be reverse engineered to retrieve the audio.

However, the Lamphone technique has its fair share of limitations. For instance, an attacker would require a direct line of sight to the light bulb, and bulbs that are decorated with covers or other materials cannot be targeted.

Similarly, conversations in windowless rooms cannot be spied upon, and for the attack to be successful the conversation has to be very loud, or else, the speaker should be closer to the light bulb.

In their experiments [PDF], the researchers were able to recover conversations from a distance of 25 meters, and they could recover both human conversation and room effects such as the music playing in the background.

Th fact that their experiment was successful is alarming for many companies as the technique can be used to spy upon unsuspecting users and retrieve audio from devices that offer similar functions as the microphone. These include vibration devices, speakers, motion sensors, magnetic hard disk drives, and even wooden tables. 

Source: Hackred

Microsoft Joins Ban on Sale of Facial Recognition Tech to Police

Microsoft has joined Amazon and IBM in banning the sale of facial recognition technology to police departments and pushing for federal laws to regulate the technology.

Microsoft is joining Amazon and IBM when it comes to halting the sale of facial recognition technology to police departments. In a statement released Thursday by Microsoft President Brad Smith, he said the ban would stick until federal laws regulating the technology’s use were put in place.

“We will not sell facial recognition tech to police in the U.S. until there is a national law in place… We must pursue a national law to govern facial recognition grounded in the protection of human rights,” Smith said during a virtual event hosted by the Washington Post.

On Wednesday, Amazon announced a one-year ban on police departments using its facial recognition technology. In a short statement the company said it would be pushing for “stronger regulations to govern the ethical use of facial recognition technology.”

The actions by both tech behemoths dovetail actions by IBM earlier this week. In a statement by IBM’s new CEO Arvind Krishna, he said that it will no longer offer general purpose facial recognition or analysis software “for mass surveillance, racial profiling, violations of basic human rights and freedoms, or any purpose which is not consistent with our values and Principles of Trust and Transparency.”

Krishna’s statements were part of a letter to Congress where he advocated policy reviews such as “police reform, responsible use of technology, and broadening skills and educational opportunities.”

The moves align with a broader demand for law enforcement reforms and calls for racial justice by social justice activists in the wake of the death of George Floyd by Minneapolis, Minnesota police and the weeks of protests that followed.

“It should not have taken the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and far too many other black people, hundred of thousands of people taking to the streets, brutal law enforcement attacks against protesters and journalists, and the deployment of military-grade surveillance equipment on protests led by black activists for these companies to wake up to the everyday realities of police surveillance for black and brown communities,” said Matt Cagle, technology and civil liberties attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California in a statement to NBC News this week.

Source: Threatpost