Tag Archive for: Intel’s

Intel’s new chips get big safety boost

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Intel and Google Cloud have just released a joint report detailing a months-long audit of a new security feature on Intel’s latest server chips: Trust Domain Extensions (TDX). The report is a result of a collaboration between security researchers from Google Cloud Security and Project Zero, and Intel engineers. It led to a number of pre-release security improvements for Intel’s new CPUs.

TDX is a feature of Intel’s 4th-generation “Sapphire Rapids” Xeon processors, though it will be available on more chips in the future. It’s designed to enable Confidential Computing on cloud infrastructure. The idea is that important computations are encrypted and performed on hardware that’s isolated from the regular computing environment. This means that the cloud service operator can’t spy on the computations being done, and makes it harder for hackers and other bad actors to intercept, modify, or otherwise interfere with the code as it runs. It basically makes it safe for companies to use cloud computing providers like Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services for processing their most important data, instead of having to operate their own secure servers.

However, for organizations to rely on features like TDX, they need some way to know that they’re genuinely secure. As we’ve seen in the past with the likes of Meltdown and Spectre, vulnerabilities at the processor level are incredibly hard to detect and mitigate for, and can allow bad actors an incredible degree of access to the system. A similar style of vulnerability in TDX, a supposedly secure processing environment, would be an absolute disaster for Intel, any cloud computing provider that used its Xeon chips, and their customers. That’s why Intel invited the Google security researchers to review TDX so closely. Google also collaborated with chipmaker AMD on a similar report last year.

According to Google Cloud’s blogpost announcing the report, “the primary goal of the security review was to provide assurances that the Intel TDX feature is secure, has no obvious defects, and works as expected so that it can be confidently used by both cloud customers and providers.” Secondarily, it was also an…

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Top 5 stories of the week: DeepMind and OpenAI advancements, Intel’s plan for GPUs, Microsoft’s zero-day flaws

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Learn how your company can create applications to automate tasks and generate further efficiencies through low-code/no-code tools on November 9 at the virtual Low-Code/No-Code Summit. Register here.

This week, Googled-owned tech lab, DeepMind, unveiled its first AI that is capable of creating its own algorithms to speed up matrix multiplication. Though it’s taught in high school math, matrix multiplication is actually fundamental to computational tasks and remains a core operation in neural networks.

In the same vein, OpenAI this week announced the release of Whisper — its open-source, deep learning model for speech recognition. The company claims the technology already shows promising results transcribing audio in several languages.

Joining the innovation sprint this week, Intel detailed a plan to make developers’ lives a bit easier, with a goal to make it possible to build an application once that can run on any operating system. Historically, this was a goal of the Java programming language, but even today the process is not uniform across the computing landscape — something Intel hopes to change.

On the security front, enterprise leaders had several new announcements to take note of this week, including the zero-day flaw exploit in Microsoft’s Exchange Server. The company confirmed that a suspected state-sponsored threat actor was able to successfully exfiltrate data from fewer than 10 organizations using its staple platform. 

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While it’s no secret that attacks like these continue to expand in both volume and intensity — the methods for preventing attacks are also evolving. Vulnerability solutions provider Tenable is one that has evolved to change its main focus, too. This week, the company announced it’s shifting its focus from vulnerability management to attack surface management and released a new tool for enterprises with…

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Intel’s Greg Lavender On Project Amber, Securing The Digital Future, Quantum Computing And ‘Y2Q’

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If Tuesday’s Intel Vision 2022 keynote offered a hopeful glimpse of the future of information technology, Wednesday’s address was a sobering reminder about the extraordinary efforts being made to secure that emerging technology. The Santa Clara, Calif. chip behemoth also announced the launch of Project Amber, a cloud security subscription service that will be available to select clients later this month.

Greg Lavender, Intel’s senior vice president, chief technology officer and general manager of the Software and Advanced Technology Group (SATG), hosted a wide-ranging discussion about security challenges and Intel’s role in the larger tech community. Lavender noted research from Cybersecurity Ventures that predicts new ransomware attacks on organizations every two seconds by 2030, an increase of 33 percent. And with technology developing at a blistering pace, with mind-blowing quantum computing set to take over our digital lives, now is the time to secure that future.

“Let me start by setting the overall environment that we’re all facing and share with you some of the work Intel is doing now and in the future to mitigate the risk,” Lavender said. “It’s not just the threat of attacks, but the actual exploits that are increasing. We are unfortunately at a point where today’s attacks use malware without ever having to write any code… And the proliferation of threats is just as relentless as the pace of innovation.”

Lavender said it was important for companies to take a non-competitive stance on security, making sure networks, software and hardware are protected. “During yesterday’s keynote, you heard from my colleagues about the ways in which we’ve all adapted and innovation has unleashed across vertical markets as a result of this rapid digital transformation we are all experiencing. But every innovation brings its own set of new challenges… it’s creating an attack surface and attack vectors at a scale that we’ve never seen before.”

Here’s what else Lavender talked about.

On Project Amber

Project Amber‘s initial offering will be a cloud agnostic multi cloud federated service with provable integrity of its verification processes. We…

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Biden Looks to Intel’s U.S. Investment to Buoy His China Agenda

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WASHINGTON — In celebrating a $20 billion investment by Intel in a new semiconductor plant in Ohio, President Biden sought on Friday to jump-start a stalled element of his economic and national security agenda: a huge federal investment in manufacturing, research and development in technologies that China is also seeking to dominate.

With two other major legislative priorities sitting moribund in Congress — the Build Back Better Act and legislation to protect voting rights — Mr. Biden moved to press for another bill, and one that has significant bipartisan support.

But he has lost seven critical months since the Senate passed the measure, a sprawling China competition bill that would devote nearly a quarter of a trillion dollars to domestic chip manufacturing, artificial intelligence research, robotics, quantum computing and a range of other technologies. The bill amounts to the most expansive industrial policy legislation in U.S. history.

Speaking at the White House, Mr. Biden said that America was in a “stiff economic and technological competition” with China. He chose the words deliberately, knowing that while it sounds obvious to American ears, Chinese officials in recent months have protested the use of the word “competition,” declaring that it has echoes of a Cold War-like contest.

“We’re going to insist everyone, including China, play by the same rules,” Mr. Biden continued. “We’re going to invest whatever it takes in America, in American innovation, in American communities, in American workers.”

He argued that the initiative would be a long-term solution to supply chain disruptions and rising inflation and would free American weapons systems from depending on foreign parts.

After months in which he rarely mentioned the China competition bill so that he did not lose focus on other elements of his agenda, Mr. Biden said on Friday that its passage was needed “for the sake of our economic competitiveness and our national security.”

“Today, we barely produce 10 percent of the computer chips despite being the leader in chip design and research,” he said. “We don’t have the ability to make the most advanced chips…

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