The OS, called Qubes, is based on Xen, X and Linux and is in a basic, alpha stage right now. Qubes relies on virtualization to separate applications running on the OS and also places many of the system-level components in sandboxes to prevent them from affecting each other.

Qubes implements Security by Isolation approach. To do this, Qubes utilizes virtualization technology, to be able to isolate various programs from each other, and even sandbox many system-level components, like networking or storage subsystem, so that their compromise don’t affect the integrity of the rest of the system.

Qubes lets the user define many security domains implemented as lightweight Virtual Machines (VMs), or “AppVMs”. E.g. user can have “personal”, “work”, “shopping”, “bank”, and “random” AppVMs and can use the applications from within those VMs just like if they were executing on the local machine, but at the same time they are well isolated from each other. Qubes supports secure copy-and-paste and file sharing between the AppVMs, of course.

The concepts of isolation and sandboxing have been around for decades, and are used in a number of applications, including hardened operating systems and some security products. And many security experts say that sandboxing is one of the more effective ways of preventing malicious code from affecting entire systems, rather than just one vulnerable application.

In a guest column in January on Threatpost, security researcher Dino Dai Zovi said that he expected more and more vendors to implement sandboxing and isolation in the coming year.

“The desktop analogue to the network firewall is the privilege separated and sandboxed application.  These mechanisms finally move the bull (untrusted data) from the china shop (your data) to the outside where it belongs (a sandbox).  While it doesn’t quite reduce the attack surface, it significantly raises the bar for an attacker through defense-in-depth.  If an attacker is able to exploit a vulnerability and execute code, they must then exploit another vulnerability in the sandboxing mechanism in order to break free and even read the user’s data,” he wrote.

Rutkowska said that she plans to release the full version of Qubes by the end of 2010, and that she may create some commercial extensions to the OS in the future.

www.threatpost.com

The processor will be targeted at four-socket servers, says Shannon Poulin, Xeon platform director at Intel. Each physical core will be able to run two threads simultaneously, giving the chip 64 virtual processing cores on servers.

Intel’s CEO Paul Otellini has described Nehalem-EX as the company’s fastest processor to date. The chip maker announced the processor last year, and said it would release the chip in the first half of this year, but did not provide an exact release date.

Poulin declined to provide the clock speed of the chips. However, the company has said it will include 24MB of cache and 2.3 billion transistors.

Intel is targeting the chip at high-end systems running data-intensive applications such as databases. IBM has said when the chip is released it would implement Nehalem-EX chips in the company’s System x EX5 servers.

The chip will be made using the 45-nanometer process and be based on the Nehalem microarchitecture, which integrates the memory controller and improves system speed by cutting data bottlenecks that plagued Intel’s earlier chips.

Intel is also including new technologies like MCA recovery error correction, which could make servers more fault tolerant and provide greater uptime, he says. The processor will be able to detect system errors originating in the CPU or system memory and correct them by working with the operating system. Some of these technologies have been adapted from Intel’s high-end Itanium processors, which are based on a separate chip architecture and go into fault-tolerant systems.

The new processor will also contain separate buffered memory chips, which can store data temporarily alongside the main memory for faster task execution.

Intel will also offer four memory channels per processor, Poulin says. That will put it on par with AMDs’ twelve-core Opteron server processors, code-named Magny-Cours, which also offer four memory channels per processor. More channels provide more memory bandwidth to run programs faster.

AMD has started shipping Magny-Cours processors, with Intel’s Nehalem-EX set to intensify the battle between the rivals, as both companies reach out to claim benchmark crowns, says Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst at Insight 64. Intel will build large amounts of cache inside Nehalem-EX that could help the processor deliver faster performance, but AMD’s Magny Cours has more physical cores per chip.

Benchmark results could vary depending on the type of task assigned, but performance is just one part of the story, he says. Nehalem-EX could reach out to new markets with additional features like fault-tolerance, Brookwood says. It could tread into territory of high-end servers dominated by Intel’s Itanium and chips based on RISC (reduced instruction set computer) architecture, which includes IBM’s Power and Sun’s Sparc processors.

Last year, when the Nehalem EX was first announced, Boyd Davis, Intel’s general manager for server platforms in the Intel marketing department, said: “This is going after a market that was limited to being served by RISC architecture”, and “We think Nehalem-EX will represent a pretty significant opportunity on the overall server and hardware market”.
But AMD could hold an advantage over Intel’s Nehalem-EX in pricing. Intel could charge a premium for Nehalem-EX chips, while AMD chips could deliver better bang-for-buck per core with Magny-Cours, Brookwood says.

Intel’s Poulin also says the company would release its next-generation Xeon server processors based on the Westmere microarchitecture later this month. The processors will be targeted at two-socket servers, Poulin says. Chips for four-socket servers will be released next year.

Intel says server chips based on Westmere will contain up to six cores. The company last month said the six-core chip contained 1.17 billion transistors and 12MB of cache. The six-core chips will deliver improved performance and power savings compared to earlier quad-core chips, according to the company.

The Westmere-EP chips will fall under the Xeon product line and will be made using the 32-nanometer process. The last refresh for server chips was in March last year, when the company announced a range of Xeon 5500 series and 3500 series chips based on the Nehalem architecture. The chips were made using the 45-nm process.

www.computerworld.co.nz

4.0 has a lot of features which users like you and I don’t really need to know about. Texture swizzling? Awesome. Tessellation? Sure, as long as it’s not like whatever they used in Messiah — remember that game? These new toys for developers will make for a richer and faster graphical experience, to be sure, but I’m not going to list them off for you.

The big news for graphics is handhelds right now. Mobile gaming is blowing up and Microsoft can’t get a foot in the door. Hell, it’s getting its foot booted out from the other side. In the other corner, OpenGL (and the rest of the Open toolset) is setting itself up as being flexible enough to be applied on a handset, a laptop, or a desktop. It may not have DirectX 11 fidelity in water shaders or the latest normal mapping technique, but it’s damn close and what’s more, it doesn’t need a high end graphics card to be the library in use. Though I feel I should add that the games coming out on Windows Phone 7 Series and the Zune HD 2 are looking pretty awesome. This race isn’t over by far.

The OpenCL thing is great as well. If you remember, OpenCL is a set of tools for offloading certain tasks from the CPU onto the GPU, when those tasks are better served by parallel processors. Loading web pages may work fine on your Snapdragon, but decoding video will have it at 100% and drain your battery — better to send it over to the GPU. The GPU computing thing hasn’t quite taken off yet, but it’s pretty much inevitable that it’ll start being implemented on a low level, since it can improve the user experience so dramatically.

I’m always happy to see this kind of steady progress. More capabilities, more competition, and better devices for everyone, OpenGL-based or not. If you’re interested, there’s much more information available.

www.crunchgear.com
www.khronos.org

The secret sauce that will drive Mozilla’s new JavaScript engine engine into the fast lane is some code borrowed from Apple’s WebKit project. Mozilla intends to bring together the powerful optimization techniques of TraceMonkey and the extremely efficient native code generator of Apple’s JSCore engine. The mashup will likely deliver a significant boost in Firefox’s JavaScript execution speed, making Mozilla’s browser a formidable contender in the ongoing JavaScript speed race.

Mozilla’s current JavaScript engine uses nanojit as its native code generator. Adobe originally developed nanojit to power Flash’s ActionScript execution and released it under an open source software license in 2006. Mozilla and Adobe were going to use nanojit to build an ECMAScript 4 implementation called Tamarin, but the project was largely abandoned when ECMAScript 4 was shelved. Mozilla integrated nanojit into its existing SpiderMonkey engine and added tracing optimization to build TraceMonkey.

Mozilla’s new JägerMonkey engine will continue to use nanojit for some things, but will rely on Apple’s Nitro Assembler to generate efficient native code. This will allow JägerMonkey to benefit from the performance advantages of method-based just-in-time (JIT) compilation. JägerMonkey will also use tracing optimization to flatten out loops and speed up other kinds of execution paths that can benefit from further optimization. Mozilla says that this blend of technologies potentially offers the best of all worlds.

“The reason we’re [building JägerMonkey] is that TraceMonkey is very fast for code that traces well, but for code that doesn’t trace, we’re stuck with the interpreter, which is not fast. The JägerMonkey method JIT will provide a much better performance baseline, and tracing will continue to speed us up on code where it applies,” wrote developer David Mandelin a blog entry about the new engine.

The project is said to be at a relatively early stage of development and is not yet ready to be broadly demonstrated. Developers who want to have a look at the code can download it from Mozilla’s version control repository. The current development status is described in a page at the Mozilla wiki.

www.arstechnica.com

Advanced Micro Devices plans to release a processor in its “Fusion” line that will be positioned for the netbook market, putting it in competition with the Intel Atom, and, to a lesser degree, the ARM processor.

The “Fusion” program is AMD’s (NYSE: AMD) long-term project to integrate its CPU cores with graphics processor cores from ATI, which it acquired in 2006. The first Fusion processors are expected some time early next year. Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) has its own integrated processors, the Westmere family of Core i5/i7 chips, which feature integrated graphics in dual-core CPUs.

AMD hasn’t yet hammered out all the specifics, but the netbook part will run in the 10-15 watt range, which is similar to the Intel Atom, and “it will have a good processor integrated with graphics, so you won’t need the [Nvidia] Ion graphics to give it half-decent performance,” according to Nigel Dessau, chief marketing officer at AMD.

The processor is likely from the “Bobcat” line of chips first disclosed last November. It will be designed for 12-inch and smaller screens. Intel has defined netbooks by screen size, and only supports 10-inch and smaller devices. AMD chose to make a new part rather than whittle down an existing one for the low-power, low-profile environment of netbooks.

www.internetnews.com

The attack by the former US Army computer-security specialist is notable because it goes where no hacker has gone before: into the widely used Infineon SLE 66PE, a microcontroller that carries the TPM, or Trusted Platform Module designation of security. The hack means he can access sensitive data and algorithms locked away in the chip’s digital vault and even make counterfeit clones that could fool the many devices that rely on it.

Its genesis came when Tarnovsky learned that manufacturers of video game controllers had to obtain a license from Microsoft for the peripherals to work on the Xbox 360. The requirement offended his sense of fair play, so he put his reverse engineering muscle to breaking it.

“I was very surprised they would put a security chip in a wired controller, as well as a wireless controller,” he said. “It’s very monopolistic what they’ve done. They have a right to do it, but I have a right to break it too.”

After dissecting a controller, he found that the chip that allowed it to communicate with the Xbox was made by Infineon. He eventually purchased dozens of related microcontrollers on the Hong Kong surplus market for 15 cents apiece.

He then employed an electron microscope called a focused ion beam workstation (price tag $250,000 used) that allowed him to view the chip in the nanometer scale so he could manipulate its individual wires using microscopic needles.

It took Tarnovsky four months to develop techniques for probing the chip and another two months to apply them to breaking the 66PE.

What he found was a chip that was locked down with multiple levels of defenses. Optical sensors, for instance, were designed to detect ambient light from luminous sources. And a wire mesh that covered the microcontroller was aimed at disabling the chip should any of its electrical circuits be disturbed.

“One wrong move and I vaporize a track on the chip,” Tarnovsky said.

Indeed, some 50 of the chips were vaporized in the course of the hack. But over time, he learned how to use the needles to penetrate the chip’s inner recesses so he could tap sensitive data that remains unencrypted so it can be processed.

Using the tungsten as microscopic bridges, Tarnovsky said, he can digitally clone chips used to prevent piracy of satellite TV service, to disable unauthorized cartridges in printers – or to make Xbox game controllers.

“You could counterfeit this chip,” he said, although he stressed he had no plans to use the hack for illegal purposes.

In a statement sent to Infineon customers last week, the company noted the time and expense required for Tarnovsky to crack the chip. But the company went on to say it was a sign of attacks to come and said engineers were already working on a more successor to the 66PE.

“In contrast to conventional solutions, the SLE 78 family now utilizes encryption even in the CPU itself, leaving no plaintext for the attacker,” the release stated. “Technical advances of that scale are only possible if the CPU itself is designed ‘from the scratch’ by the hardware manufacturer with security in mind, right from the beginning.”

The physical attack on the 66PE is similar to hacks cryptographers have recently waged on proprietary encryption algorithms in cordless phones and the world’s most popular smartcard. In all of them, the secret formula was lifted after sanding down the chips’ silicon and examining its circuitry using an electron or optical microscope.

“More and more things are moving to hardware, and as things move to hardware, people are analyzing these devices and getting the algorithms out and putting them back in the software,” Tarnovsky said.

While the risks of physical attacks are in many cases inevitable, he said the cracking of the 66PE was aided by its abundant supply on international surplus markets, which is something Infineon may want to consider as it readies its new generation of ultra-secure microcontrollers.

“If this is supposed to be such a secure device and it’s common-criteria certified, why are they available on the used surplus market?” he said. “This device should not have been readily available for a researcher like me.”

www.theregister.co.uk

If this works, you could theoretically speak to someone on the phone who doesn’t speak your language. And you two could communicate in real-time. Something tells us the iPhone App Store won’t be getting this right after Android, but who knows.

www.hothardware.com

However, if we look back over the last decade, relationship between Apple and Adobe have also been tagged with some dark periods. It probably starts when Apple launched its movie/video edition suite, Final Cut Pro that killed Première on Mac OS X in a record time. Over the last versions of the Adobe Creative Suite, optimizations developed specifically for Windows, leaving Mac OS X users with an older and slower code, probably fueled the Apple resentment, leading to today’s open conflict.

One of our source, very close to an Apple executive and decision board sent us some information and comments, highlighting the current situation with a new angle bringing further details on the roots and reasons concerning the conflict between Apple and Adobe. Let’s start with a sentence from Steve Jobs spoken at the Apple HQ:

“Like Microsoft, Adobe has become a stodgy and conservative company, they’ve lost their focus – they are stuck in the middle.”

Below are some details of Apple’s complains against Adobe, some things are known from the public, others not:

• Adobe completely missed the transition to Cocoa, and tried to extend the use of Carbon, causing problems for both users and Apple. They only now start to work within the programming environment, however, the first beta of the new Creative Suite 5 remain incomplete and unstable.
• Adobe is reported to be very slow to react when Apple sends them bug reports, especially about Flash. Apple sent them description of 410 bugs, identified as important for Flash on Mac OS X, but Adobe only fixed 25 of them so far. Another comment from Steve Jobs about Flash:

“Flash has become a collection of cobbled together technologies – a Kludge. It takes a huge amount of processing power and memory – it is too inefficient, and takes too long to learn.“

• According to Apple, the lack of Flash on the first iPhone OS was not a choice, but rather the consequence of the inability of Adobe to offer a mobile and power efficient bug-free Flash version.
• Apple is also upset about Adobe Software Activation, their anti-piracy protection. This system forces CS users to validate their license online. In order to prevent any bypassing by software-based debuggers, the ASA shunts the system in order to directly access the deepest layer of the CPU and the RAM, without considering the protection of such components built into Mac OS X. As a consequence it would increase the risk of crash and fragmentation, making Mac OS X unable to manage or better control them. So, every time the ASA is modified or updated as it has already been hacked a certain number of times, Adobe asks Apple to take measures on its system to let the ASA work efficiently, without creating too much instability
• Last but not least, Apple thinks that the user interface of current Adobe applications is now getting too old, and did not move to a more user friendly version; and finally the price of the Creative Suite are just too high according to Apple’s ranking.

The recent comments from Steve Jobs regarding Adobe might well be the first sign of a “cold war” between the two companies. Apple would be already preparing and developing applications to compete directly with Adobe’s solutions, leading to open warfare. Cupertino would also be developing a software that could compete with Flash and Dreamweaver, entirely based on HTML 5.0. Beside Aperture X which should be released soon, Apple might also be working to develop a solution similar to Photoshop, a high-end Pro-oriented solution. We do not know further details about those applications being developed as it is either hidden from view or just starting.

www.hardmac.com

“To lead the entire semiconductor industry with the most advanced process technology is a phenomenal feat for Intel and Micron, and we look forward to further pushing the scaling limits,” said Brian Shirley, vice president of Micron’s memory group. “This production technology will enable significant benefits to our customers through higher density media solutions.”

“Through our continued investment in IMFT, we’re delivering leadership technology and manufacturing that enable the most cost-effective and reliable NAND memory,” said Tom Rampone, vice president and general manager, Intel NAND Solutions Group. “This will help speed the adoption of solid-state drive solutions for computing.”

So what does this mean for consumers? Basically, the shrink to 25nm reduces the dies size of the NAND flash chips, which enables higher densities, and hence the chip count within products can be reduced by up to 50% when compared to the previous process generation. It allows for smaller, yet higher density designs at lower costs. For example, a particular SSD may be able to be produced using only 16 chips versus 32. Solid State Drives will feature larger maximum capacities while prices of current options will be driven further down. We were told to expect performance to be on par with 34nm products, though there are the obvious intrinsic benefits of a die geometry shrink from a performance standpoint.

Of course, there will be a number of products based on this technology over time. The first one will be the industry’s first monolithic 8GB NAND device. At a die size of 167mm², it is twice the capacity of their highest density 34nm part in roughly the same footprint. It is small enough to fit through the hole in the middle of a compact disc, but is able to store more than 10 times the data capacity of a CD. In roughly the same real estate, SSD makers will now be able to provide double the capacity as the previous generation.

IMFT is on track to begin production of this device and expects to start shipping in the second quarter of this year. Consumers can expect products featuring 25nm flash memory towards the end of 2010.

Micron and Intel are also supporters of the Open NAND Flash Interface (ONFI). ONFI is a consortium of tech companies working to develop open standards for NAND memory and supporting devices. The formation of the group was initially announced at the Intel Developer Forum in 2006 and began the effort to standardize the low level interface to NAND flash chips that are on the market today. One of the main motivations for this is to make it easier to switch between chips from different manufacturers, which allows faster development of NAND-based products and lower prices through broader competition among manufacturers. Besides Intel and Micron, the ONFI consortium is led by several prominent manufactures of NAND such as Hynix, SanDisk, and Sony.

The 8GB NAND device shown above supports the ONFI 2.2 interface standard, delivering up to 200MB/s of throughput bandwidth. Both Intel and Micron have been pleased with it and feel it is very much in tune to what they have driven in the DRAM world, using standard synchronous interfaces to increase speed. This is critical when SSD manufacturers rely on high speed communication between chips.

In January 2006, Micron and Intel formed IM Flash Technologies, LLC. IMFT combines the technology, assets, and industry experience of the two companies to create NAND flash memory. Jointly investing over $2 billion dollars, they opened up a semiconductor fabrication plant in Lehi, Utah which currently operates 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This fab employs about two thousand people.

The central area of the fab is the clean room, where the environment is controlled and air is scrubbed to eliminate dust down to micrometer size and no more than 10 particles per cubic meter levels. Before entering the fabrication areas, we put on clean room suits also known as bunny suits. These garments covered all parts of the body with the exception of eyes and the nose. Once inside, the lack of people working inside the fab was surprising. It was explained that most of the people we saw were technicians conducting preventive maintenance and ensuring the equipment operated within specifications. What the images are unable to show is the bustling movement of machinery occurring overhead and along the walls of this fully automated fab, carrying materials to the various stations within the plant.

www.hothardware.com

Bright Side of News has unveiled what the Apple A4 really is, and it has been able to do so thanks to a little chat it had with Warren East, CEO of ARM, during the GlobalFoundries event in Las Vegas. Warren East talked about a new member of the ARM family – this new member was Apple, Bright Side of News can now confirm.

So, what, exactly, is the Apple A4? Technically, it isn’t a CPU. It might be semantics (but hey, where would the internet be without semantics?), but the A4 is actually a system-on-chip, a piece of silicon that containts not only the CPU, but also the graphics core, memory controller, and so on.

The Apple A4 consists of an ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore, the same processor that powers the NVIDIA Tegra and Qualcomm Snapdragon. The graphics unit is a ARM Mali 50-Series. The key thing to note here is that this is all mostly ARM IP; Apple and P.A.Semi have little to do with it. Since Apple doesn’t have its own chip factory, this thing is produced by Samsung.

Because of Apple’s apparent disinterest in divulging specifications, we have to rely on pieces of information all over the web. What is pretty clear, though, is that the Apple A4 is pretty much a relatively standard ARM SoC, similar to what’s powering the Zune HD. It doesn’t give the iPad any specific industry advantage, as there are numerous similar chips that deliver the same kind of performance (Tegra, Snapdragon).

www.osnews.com
www.brightsideofnews.com