The Best Practices for OSS Developers working group is dedicated to raising awareness and education of secure code best practices for open source developers.
As attackers have lost the easy ability to execute code stored in writable
memory, they have increasingly turned to return-oriented
programming (ROP) and related techniques to compromise vulnerable
systems. ROP attacks use the code that is present in the program under
attack and are hard to defend against in software. In response, hardware
vendors are developing ways to defeat ROP-like techniques at a lower
level. One of the results is Intel s Control-Flow
Enforcement Technology (CET) [PDF], which adds two mechanisms (shadow
stacks and indirect-branch tracking) that are intended to resist these
attacks. Yu-cheng Yu recently posted a set
of patches showing how this technology is to be used to defend Linux
systems.
After many delays, Intel has finally launched the long-awaited Sapphire Rapids family of server processors, now named the 4th Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors and the Intel Xeon CPU Max Series. Both names are mouthfuls, which has become typical of Intel product naming. Also typical is Intel’s ability to change the playing field to its…