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Oracle’s M7 Processor Has Security On Silicon
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Oracle started shipping systems based on its latest Sparc M7 processor, which the firm said will go a long way to solving the world’s online security problems by building protection into the silicon.
The Sparc M7 chip was originally unveiled at last year’s Openworld show in San Francisco, and was touted at the time as a Heartbleed-prevention tool.
A year on, and Oracle announced the Oracle SuperCluster M7, along with Sparc T7 and M7 servers, at the show. The servers are all based on the 32-core, 256-thread M7 microprocessor, which offers Security in Silicon for better intrusion protection and encryption, and SQL in Silicon for improved database efficiency.
Along with built-in security, the SuperCluster M7 packs compute, networking and storage hardware with virtualisation, operating system and management software into one giant cloud infrastructure box.
Oracle CTO Larry Ellison was on hand at Openworld on Tuesday to explain why the notion of building security into the silicon is so important.
“We are not winning a lot of these cyber battles. We haven’t lost the war but we’re losing a lot of the battles. We have to rethink how we deliver technology especially as we deliver vast amounts of data to the cloud,” he told delegates.
Ellison said that Oracle’s approach to this cyber war is to take security as low down in the stack as possible.
“Database security is better than application security. You should always push security as low in the stack as possible. At the bottom of the stack is silicon. If all of your data in the database is encrypted, that’s better than having an application code that encrypts your data. If it’s in the database, every application that uses that database inherits that security,” he explained.
“Silicon security is better than OS security. Then every operating system that runs on that silicon inherits that security. And the last time I checked, even the best hackers have not figured out a way to download changes to your microprocessor. You can’t alter the silicon, that’s really tricky.”
Ellison’s big idea is to take software security features out of operating systems, VMs and even databases in some cases – because software can be changed – and instead push them into the silicon, which can’t be. He is also urging for security to be switched on as default, without an option to turn it back off again.
“The security features should always be on. We provide encryption in our databases but it can be switched off. That is a bad idea. There should be no way to turn off encryption. The idea of being able to turn on and off security features makes no sense,” he said.
Ellison referred back to a debate that took place at Oracle when it first came up with its backup system – should the firm have only encrypted backups. “We did a customer survey and customers said no, we don’t want to pay the performance penalty in some cases,” he recalled. “In that case customer choice is a bad idea. Maybe someone will forget to turn on encryption when it should have been turned on and you lose 10 million credit cards.”
The Sparc M7 is basically Oracle’s answer to this dire security situation. Ellison said that while the M7 has lots of software features built into the silicon, the most “charismatic” of these is Silicon Secured Memory, which is “deceptively simple” in how it works.
“Every time a computer program asks for memory, say you ask for 8MB of memory, we compute a key and assign this large number to that 8MB of memory,” he explained. “We take those bits and we lock that memory. We also assign that same number to the program. Every time the program accesses memory, we check that number to make sure it’s the memory you allocated earlier. That compare is done by the hardware.”
If a program tries to access memory belonging to another program, the hardware detects a mismatch and raises a signal, flagging up a possible breach or bug.
“We put always-on memory intrusion detection into the silicon. We’re always looking for Heartbleed and Venom-like violations. You cannot turn it off,” the CTO warned.
“We’ve also speeded up encryption and decompression, which is kind of related to encryption. It runs at memory speed there’s zero cost in doing that. We turn it on, you can’t turn it off, it’s on all the time. It’s all built into the M7.”
Ellison claimed that running M7-based systems will stop threats like Heartbleed and Venom in their tracks.
“The way Venom worked, the floppy disc driver concealed this code. It’s the worst kind of situation, you’re writing into memory you’re not supposed to. You’re writing computer instructions into the memory and you’ve just taken over the whole computer,” he explained. “You can steal and change data. M7 – the second we tried to write that code into memory that didn’t belong to that program, where the keys didn’t match, that would have been detected real-time and that access would have been foiled.
All well and good, except for the fact that nearly every current computer system doesn’t run off the M7 processor. Ellison claimed that even if only three or four percent of servers in the cloud an organisation is using have this feature, they will be protected as they’ll get the early warning to then deal with the issue across non-M7 systems.
“You don’t have to replace every micro processor, you just have to replace a few so you get the information real-time,” he added.
“You’ll see us making more chips based on security, to secure our cloud and to sell to people who want to secure their clouds or who want to have secure computers in their datacentre. Pushing security down into silicon is a very effective way to do that and get ahead of bad guys.”
SuperCluster M7 and Sparc M7 servers are available now. Pricing has not been disclosed but based on normal Oracle hardware costs, expect to dig deep to afford one.
Source-http://www.thegurureview.net/computing-category/oracles-new-m7-processor-has-security-on-silicon.html
Enterprise Needs Driving Cloud Sales Boom
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The cloud continues to gain major ground, driven by enterprise storage needs.
Sales are way up for little-known manufacturers that sell directly to big cloud companies like Google and Facebook, while the market for traditional external storage systems is shrinking, according to research company IDC.
Internet giants and service providers typically don’t use specialized storage platforms in their sprawling data centers. Instead, they buy vast amounts of capacity in the form of generic hardware that’s controlled by software. As users flock to cloud-based services, that’s a growing business.
Revenue for original design manufacturers that sell directly to hyperscale data-center operators grew by 25.8 percent to more than US$1 billion in the second quarter, according to the latest global IDC report on enterprise storage systems. Overall industry revenue rose just 2.1 percent from last year’s second quarter, reaching $8.8 billion.
These so-called ODMs are low-profile vendors, many of them based in Taiwan, that do a lot of their business manufacturing hardware that’s sold under better known brand names. Examples include Quanta Computer and Wistron.
General enterprises aren’t buying many systems from these vendors, but the trends at work in hyperscale deployments are growing across the industry. Increasingly, the platform of choice for storage is a standard x86 server dedicated to storing data, according to IDC analyst Eric Sheppard. Sales of server-based storage rose 10 percent in the quarter to reach $2.1 billion.
Traditional external systems like SANs (storage area networks) are still the biggest part of the enterprise storage business, logging $5.7 billion in revenue for the quarter. But sales in this segment were down 3.9 percent.
Overall demand for storage capacity continued to grow strongly, with 37 percent more capacity shipped in the quarter compared with a year earlier.
Source-http://www.thegurureview.net/aroundnet-category/enterprise-storage-needs-driving-cloud-sales-boom.html
Oracle’s New Processor Goes For The Cheap
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Oracle is looking to expand the market for its Sparc-based servers with a new, low-cost processor which it curiously called Sonoma.
The company isn’t saying yet when the chip will be in the shops but the spec shows that could become a new rival for Intel’s Xeon chips and make Oracle’s servers more competitive.
Sonoma is named after a place where they make cheap terrible Californian wine and Oracle aims the chip at Sparc-based servers at “significantly lower price points” than now.
This means that companies can use them for smaller, less critical applications.
Oracle has not done much with its Sparc line-up for a couple of years, and Sonoma was one of a few new chips planned. The database maker will update its Sparc T5, used in its mid-range systems and the high-end Sparc M7. The technology is expected to filter to the Sonoma lower tier servers.
The Sparc M7 will have technologies for encryption acceleration and memory protection built into the chip. It will include coprocessors to speed up database performance.
According to IDG Sonoma will take those same technologies and bring them down to low-cost points. This means that people can use them in cloud computing and for smaller applications.
He didn’t talk about prices or say how much cheaper the new Sparc systems will be, and it could potentially be years before Sonoma comes to market.
Amazon, Microsoft Cut Cloud Storage Prices
February 6, 2014 by admin
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Last April, Microsoft agreed that it would match Amazon’s Web Services’ (AWS’) prices for compute, storage and bandwidth.
So when Amazon announced last Thursday that it would cut its S3 (Simple Storage Service) and Elastic Block Store (EBS) prices by up to 22%, Microsoft followed suit the very next day.
“We are matching AWS’ lowest prices (US East Region) for S3 and EBS, reducing prices by up to 20% and making the lower prices available in all regions worldwide,” Microsoft posted in its official blog.
For Microsoft’s “Locally Redundant Disks/Page Blobs Storage,” the company is reducing prices by up to 28%. It is also reducing the price of Azure Storage service by 50%.
Amazon’s new prices take effect Feb. 1. Microsoft’s price cuts begin March 13.
“We’re also making the new prices effective worldwide, which means that Azure storage will be less expensive than AWS in many regions,” Microsoft said.
Amazon said it dropped its prices for its S3 storage by 22% and its EBS standard volume storage and I/O operations by up to 50%.
Was Dropbox Really Hacked?
January 24, 2014 by admin
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Dropbox suffered a major outage over the weekend.
In one of the more bizarre recent incidents, after the service went down on Friday evening a group of hackers claimed to have infiltrated the service and compromised its servers.
However, on the Dropbox blog, Dropbox VP of engineering Ardita Ardwarl told users that hackers were not to blame.
Ardwari said, “On Friday evening we began a routine server upgrade. Unfortunately, a bug installed this upgrade on several active servers, which brought down the entire service. Your files were always safe, and despite some reports, no hacking or DDOS attack was involved.”
The fault occurred when a bug in an upgrade script caused an operating system upgrade to be triggered on several live machines, rendering them inoperative. Although the fault was rectified in three hours, the knock-on effects led to problems that lasted through the weekend for some users.
Dropbox has assured users that there are no further problems and that all users should now be back online. It said that at no point were files in danger, adding that the affected machines didn’t host any user data. In other words, the “hackers” weren’t hackers at all, but attention seeking trolls.
Dropbox claims to have over 200 million users, many of which it has acquired through strategic partnerships with device manufacturers offering free storage with purchases.
The company is looking forward to an initial public offering (IPO) on the stock market, so the timing of such a major outage could not be worse. Dropbox, which includes Bono and The Edge from U2 amongst its investors, has recently enhanced its business offering to appeal to enterprise clients, and such a loss of uptime could affect its ability to attract customers.
Developers Hack Dropbox
Two developers have penetrated Dropbox’s security, even intercepting SSL data from its servers and bypassing the cloud storage provider’s two-factor authentication, according to a paper they published at USENIX 2013.
“These techniques are generic enough and we believe would aid in future software development, testing and security research,” the paper says in its abstract.
Dropbox, which claims more than 100 million users upload more than a billion files daily, said the research didn’t actually represent a vulnerability in its servers.
“We appreciate the contributions of these researchers and everyone who helps keep Dropbox safe,” a spokesperson said in an email to Computerworld. “In the case outlined here, the user’s computer would first need to have been compromised in such a way that it would leave the entire computer, not just the user’s Dropbox, open to attacks across the board.”
The two developers, Dhiru Kholia, with the Openwall open source project , and Przemyslaw Wegrzyn, with CodePainters, said they reverse-engineered Dropbox, an application written in Python.
“Our work reveals the internal API used by Dropbox client and makes it straightforward to write a portable open-source Dropbox client,” the paper states. “Additionally, we show how to bypass Dropbox’s two-factor authentication and gain access to users’ data.”
The paper presents “new and generic techniques to reverse engineer frozen Python applications, which are not limited to just the Dropbox world,” the developers wrote.
The researchers described in detail how they were able to unpack, decrypt and decompile Dropbox from scratch. And, once someone has de-compiled its source code, how “it is possible to study how Dropbox works in detail.
“We describe a method to bypass Dropbox’s two-factor authentication and hijack Dropbox accounts. Additionally, generic techniques to intercept SSL data using code injection techniques and monkey patching are presented,” the developers wrote in the paper.
The process they used included various code injection techniques and monkey-patching to intercept SSL data in a Dropbox client. They also used the techniques successfully to snoop on SSL data in other commercial products as well, they said.
The developers are hoping their white hat hacking prompts Dropbox to open source its platform so that it is no longer a “black box.”
Cloud Storage Specs Approved
The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has ratified the Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI), a set of protocols defining how businesses can safely transport data between private and public clouds.
The Storage Networking Industry Association’s (SNIA) Cloud Storage Initiative Group submitted the standard for approval by the ISO last spring. CDMI is the first industry-developed open standard specifically for data storage as a service.
“There is strong demand for cloud computing standards and to see one of our most active consortia partners contribute this specification in such a timely fashion is very gratifying,” Karen Higginbottom, chairwoman of the ISO committee, said in a statement. “The standard will improve cloud interoperability.”
The CDMI specification is a way to create an interface for accessing data in the cloud by preserving metadata about information that an enterprise stores in the cloud. With metadata associated with the information, companies can retrieve data no matter where it’s stored.
“With the metadata piece, it’s also complementary with existing interfaces. The standard can be used with Amazon, for file or block data and it can use any number of storage protocols, such as NFS, CIFS or iSCSI,” said SNIA Chairman Wayne Adams.
Based on a RESTful HTTP protocol, CDMI provides both a data path and control path for cloud storage and standardizes a common interoperable format for securely moving data and its associated data requirements from cloud to cloud. The standard applies to public, private and hybrid deployment models for storage clouds.
Good Technology Updates Security
July 25, 2012 by admin
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Good Technology today announced two updates to its mobile security software products across IOS, Android and Windows Phone devices.
Powering mobile security for major enterprises such as Barclays, Sainsbury’s and LOCOG, Good Technology claims the releases are the first of a kind for the industry and address security threats linked to the bring your own device (BYOD) procedures being used in most big companies.
The first update announced by the firm is the addition of what it calls “Appkinetics” to its Good Dynamics line, which aims to solve the problem of secure private corporate data leakage.
“Good’s patented AppKinetics technology builds on the company’s proven ‘containerization’ security model to enable business apps from Good, its Good Dynamics partner independent software vendors (ISV), and internal enterprise developers,” the firm said in a statement.
“This is to securely exchange information within and between applications and create seamless multi-app workflows without compromising security or employees’ privacy and personal experience.”
The firm’s second update is the addition of eight new partnered apps to its Good Dynamics ecosystem covering the areas of business intelligence, collaboration, document editing, document printing, file storage/content management, remote desktop management and mobile application development platforms (MADPs).
This update allows developers to integrate the Good Dynamics technology into apps so that companies can create secure end-to-end workflows of protected, mobile applications to drive business processes.
Good Technology’s EMEA GM Andy Jacques explained, “If you download the standard consumer document editing application you can copy and paste from that from that app into another app.”
He continued, “If you were to open a piece of corporate mission critical data you can copy and paste that and put it onto Hotmail for example.”