Qian Ge and co-authors win Best Paper award at APSys 2018

2018-10-03 The paper “No security without time protection: we need a new hardware-software contract” by Qian Ge, Yuval Yarom and Gernot Heiser won Best Paper at the APSys Workshop in Korea. It demonstrates that contemporary processors lack the mechanisms that the operating system (OS) needs to prevent timing channels of the kind that enable the Spectre attacks. The paper consequently proposes an improved hardware-software contract that gives the OS the means to prevent such channels.

An international team including Yuval Yarom revealed Foreshadow at the 2018 Usenix Security Conference
2018-08-16 Following on from Spectre and Meltdown, an international team including Yuval Yarom discovered that using speculative execution on recent Intel processors can be used to extract information that is meant to be hidden by Intel Software Guard eXtensions (SGX). Intel have since extended the scope of the attack: you can read more here.

seL4 now runs on RISC-V64
2018-04-18 Release 9.0.1 of the seL4 kernel has prototype support for RISC-V64. At the time of release, seL4-test passes on the Spike emulation platform, with single core, and without FPU. Full details were released to the seL4 devel mailing list

Everything you’ve been told about passwords is wrong
2018-02-19 The US expert who wrote the standard for password security now says he was wrong — and it's time for a new way. Gernot Heiser has been interviewed by InTheBlack about computer security regarding passwords — and that part of the solution is to use long, memorable passphrases rather than passwords.

seL4 based AltoCrypt secure communication device wins AU Army development contract
2018-02-19 Australian company Penten Services has won a $1.3m innovation contract for their seL4 based AltoCrypt secure communication device. The device will provide secure wireless communication to the army to protect it from cyber threats. Read more here.