Abstract Summary The Broadband Monitoring Programme seeks to provide real-world data sampled from consumer Internet services so that Retail Service Provider (RSP) products can be compared by an independent body (the ACCC) and the results are published publicly. The ACCC has commissioned SamKnows to conduct this data collection using ‘whitebox’ devices that are pre-configured and are simply connected to the end user’s router. As one of the participants of this programme, I quickly noticed the data being collected and reported by my whitebox showed my connection performance was implausibly low.SEE DETAILS <span class="more-link-h...

On April 14 Intel disclosed their architectural vulnerability to a new group of side channel attacks collectively called MDS (Microarchitectural Data Sampling). Intel have provided microcode updates to their manufacturing partners for firmware updates, as well as to Microsoft, Linux and other OS developers for integration in future software patches. If you remember back to last January’s disclosure of Spectre, this sounds very much like the same thing all over again. Spectre was the first time we’d seen an architectural vulnerability like this, and the security industry predicted it wasSEE DETAILS <span class=...

We still get asked this question frequently. In simple terms, virtualisation is taking your existing physical computers and making a ‘software’ copy of them. This is quite easy, because all the configured, important parts of your servers are already software anyway – the operating system itself, the programs you run, and the data you’re storing. Virtualisation platforms have a standard (identical) software version of the computer ‘hardware’ for all the virtual computers to run on top of – think of it like every computer in the world having identical hardwareSEE DETAILS

We’ve been busily auditing client environments and evaluating their readiness for Spectre mitigation. Frustratingly, of the long list of devices, computers and mainboards we have, the vast majority of products greater than two years old don’t have firmware patches available on the manufacturers’ support websites. In reaching out to Gigabyte support to determine if they did, in fact, have firmware available for a particular model, we were then provided with the file. When we asked why they have firmware available that isn’t being published on the product’s support page, theySEE DETAILS <...

Following up from our recent article on the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities, we’ve had confirmation from Gigabyte that Award BIOS motherboard products cannot apply the Intel CPU microcode that patches the Spectre flaws. According to them this affects all Award BIOS products from all manufacturers. In that case, even though the CPUs may be supported by Intel, the platform itself is not, so there’s no way to apply the CPU microcode and protect that system from Spectre. There’s a possibility that Microsoft may release a future patch that includes theSEE DETAILS