We finally got our grubby paws on the flagship SKU of Intel's new Comet Lake desktop processors—the (sorta) 5.3GHz, (well over) 125W TDP i9-10900K. Intel's extremely lackluster performance marketing led us to believe the processor would probably be little if any improvement over last year's i9-9900K—but, happily, that's not the case.
Microsoft and Intel have recently collaborated on a new research project that explored a new approach to detecting and classifying malware.
Called STAMINA (STAtic Malware-as-Image Network Analysis), the project relies on a new technique that converts malware samples into grayscale images and then scans the image for textural and structural patterns specific to malware samples.
Over the last two years, security researchers have dug up one technique after another that lets a hacker trick Intel's microprocessors into spilling a computer's deepest secrets. As those flaws have been exposed, chipmakers have scrambled to patch them. But for one serious form of those attacks, it turns out that Intel still hasn't successfully patched the underlying problem despite 18 months of warnings—and not one but two failed attempts to do so.
To counter the growing sophistication of computer attacks, Intel and other chip makers have built digital vaults into CPUs to segregate sensitive computations and secrets from the main engine computers use. Now, scientists have devised an attack that causes the Software Guard Extensions—Intel's implementation of this secure CPU environment to divulge cryptographic keys and induce potentially dangerous memory errors.
Intel's new i9-10980XE, debuting on the same day as AMD's new Threadripper line, occupies a strange market segment: the "budget high-end desktop." Its 18 cores and 36 threads sound pretty exciting compared to Intel's top-end gaming CPU, the i9-9900KS—but they pale in comparison to Threadripper 3970x's 32 cores and 64 threads. Making things worse, despite having more than double the cores, i9-10980XE has trouble differentiating itself even from the much less expensive i9-9900KS in many benchmarks.
Intel addressed 77 vulnerabilities during the November 2019 Patch Tuesday, with more than two dozen of them being high severity and critical security flaws impacting Windows and Linux.
The issues were detailed in the 18 security advisories published by Intel on its Product Security Center, with the company having delivered them to users through the Intel Platform Update (IPU) process.
All Intel CPUs based upon Haswell up to the latest Cascade Lake CPUs have been discovered to be vulnerable to a new variant of Zombieload attacks, now known as Zombieload V2 as detailed in this whitepaper.
Apple today announced that it will acquire the majority of Intel's smartphone modem business for $1 billion. The acquisition will bring 2,200 Intel employees under Apple's umbrella, along with various intellectual properties, leases, and equipment. After the move is complete, Apple will hold more than 17,000 wireless technology patents, and Intel will still be able to develop modems for PCs, vehicles, IoT devices, and other products that aren't smartphones.
Researchers have found a new way to defeat the boot verification process for some Intel-based systems, but the technique can also impact other platforms and can be used to compromise machines in a stealthy and persistent way.
Researchers Peter Bosch and Trammell Hudson presented a time-of-check, time-of-use (TOCTOU) attack against the Boot Guard feature of Intel's reference Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) implementation at the Hack in the Box conference in Amsterdam this week.
First disclosed in January 2018, the Meltdown and Spectre attacks have opened the floodgates, leading to extensive research into the speculative execution hardware found in modern processors, and a number of additional attacks have been published in the months since.
