Code can always change, but silicon is forever... more or less. Today's quartet of Black Hat Briefing highlights, which will all take place at Black Hat USA 2014, examine security with a focus on the hard stuff.
It's always fun when a solution for one issue can be repurposed to solve another problem. Creating a Spider Goat: Using Transactional Memory Support for Security brings us another example, in which the presenters bent the Transactional Synchronization Extension (TSX) memory conflict avoidance features of modern Intel CPUs toward security purposes. Used this way, TSX can detect malicious RAM modifications with minimal overhead. They'll also address potential problems of this unofficial use case.
The last decade's seen great advances in secure software development practices, but secure hardware development remains essentially undefined. Most hardware doesn't bother with security routines, or it keeps them obfuscated and secretive. SecSi Product Development: Techniques for Ensuring Secure Silicon Applied to Open-Source Verilog Projects