Pushing the frontier of knowledge

I was answering some questions about secure boot recently, and 'Building Secure Firmware' https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4842-6106-4 was mentioned. 

 

While visiting the book site I was curious about who was citing it these days https://link.altmetric.com/details/93414671/citations. 

This list is always interesting to compare against the big G's citations https://scholar.google.com/scholar?oi=bibs&hl=en&cites=16997507852059049037. Not surprisingly Scholar omits the above citation - perhaps the big G's Skynet is deprioritizing jobs on Scholar and Patents in lieu of training and serving the latest Gemini? 

Regarding the Apress citations, I was intrigued by the 2027 confidential computing (CC) book chapter mention. After clicking in I was happily surprised (well, maybe not so 'surprised' given the energy and intelligence of the author) to find https://www.sciencedirect.com/book/monograph/9780443540677/confidential-computing

by Jiewen Yao. Although several years have passed since I've had contact with Jiewen, he was a collaborator on the Secure Firmware book and many other projects, patents, presentations and papers back in the day for the EDKII and security space at Intel. In fact upon retiring from Intel I asked him to take up my chair of the UEFI Security Subteam and seat on the Trusted Computing Group Technical Committee (as Intel's rep). 

When he dove into confidential computing many moons ago, I joked to myself that he 'graduated' from UEFI middle school into confidential computing college, whereas I stayed back in the UEFI classroom.

Speaking of graduation, I'm honored to be among the members of the network he mentions (one of the thirty or so Intel souls cited), too https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/chapter/monograph/pii/B9780443540677050014

Although I dabbled in various uses of SGX for firmware, the precursor of the virtualization-based TDX for CC, I spent less energy on TDX while at Intel. One bridge from TDX to host firmware, though, is https://patents.google.com/patent/US20250258963A1/en 

Interesting that the above is classified under 'Secure Boot' by the USPTO. Apparently I have a few under that category https://patents.google.com/?q=(G06F21%2f575)&inventor=vincent+zimmer&oq=(G06F21%2f575)+vincent+zimmer  I'm curious as to how they manager their taxonomies at the USPTO.

As evidence of those two arcs of CC versus UEFI, Jiewen continues to maintain his firmware work as he has also moved into a solo book on confidential computing, I would imagine. On my side, I'm still enrapt by host firmware, including UEFI, with a steady diet of various UEFI implementations and now more reaches into the OS. I guess that a quarter century in an area builds some stickiness (1998 IBI, 1992 EFI1.02?). 

A fortiori, I still want to fulfill my drive to add more formal rigor to the host firmware domain. A scan of this blog and some of my earlier talks and books will make that ambition no surprise. One example of my post-Intel work in this vein includes a paper https://zenodo.org/records/22834103 I'll present in late October https://www.ieee-cars.org/program/papers?q=zimmer

This paper's definitely incomparable to a full-up book, weighing in at 8 versus 400 pp., but it is some small signal of how I'm still trying to move the needle in my perhaps Quixotic quest to formalize UEFI. I started here with some formalization of the circa 2008/9 Firmware Management Protocol https://www.intel.com/content/dam/doc/guide/uefi-secure-firmware-lockdown-idf2009-presentation.pdf and Capsule (from 2006 https://www.amazon.com/Beyond-BIOS-Implementing-Extensible-Interface/dp/0974364908)

update flows https://uefi.org/specs/UEFI/2.11/Frontmatter/Revision_History.html and open source artifacts https://github.com/tianocore/edk2.

As far as more books on my side, hats off to Jiewen for his accomplishment. From my book publication run of 2006 to 2022, memories of getting hounded by editors for some of those nine texts still gives me the night sweats at times. Writing a book while balancing an intense tech-industry job is like having two jobs concurrently. 

Who knows, though, given the rapid advance of technology it's definitely a target-rich environment I might tap into again? Tech books definitely don't yield any real pecuniary gain but to me they help scale technologies and pass on wisdom learned through hard-fought years of technical investment. I often challenge myself to write a book that I wish I'd had way back when I started in a domain myself.

Well, maybe it's time to close another Saturday entry into my decidedly peripatetic blog. Now back to work.

Reunion cycle

I just received the following post-card in the mail for https://www.cornell.edu/

[front]

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This round of reunions appears to target graduates in years ending in 2's and 7's

I recall that a couple of Anduril executives, Brian Schimpf and Matt Grimm https://www.anduril.com/anduril-leadership, are each Cornell graduates. It turns out that each appear to be 7's. Courtesy of Linkedin, viz., 

with this being their 20th with the 7 suffix. The CU lineage came to my mind after seeing them together in a presentation shortly after receiving this card. 

For this reunion round I'm targeting my 35th graduation anniversary with a 2 suffix (1/1992)

 

A 15 year gap between their graduation and mine which is not quite a generational gap (20-30 years), although it has definitely been a generation of graduates between my cohort in 1992 and the recent class.

This last point of generational gaps come to the fore for me when I bumped into the parody page  https://theonion.com/man-confident-he-wouldve-been-brave-enough-to-send-thumbs-down-emoji-in-cornell-group-chat/

I guess that I have inadvertently been 'brave' since I find myself often giving the thumbs-up emoji in Slack when I want to acknowledge a message. I confess that I had to Google the below explanation after reading the Onion headline above.

Maybe a potential use for personal ambient AI is to provide me a pop-up when I commit these faux pas in the future :)  

Beyond better instant messaging hygiene, it would be interesting to visit the Cornell campus since I haven't been there since 1992. I wonder if my EE haunt of Philips Hall, the proximate Upson Hall for comp sci on the engineering quad, and the hike to White Hall for math (if my memory holds) are still around.

And given the beauty of the region, Ithaca definitely qualifies for the saying https://alumni.cornell.edu/cornellians/ithaca-is-gorges/.  Hopefully Ithaca hasn't gone all Austin, TX, namely tie-die of "Keep Ithaca Weird". I can only absorb so much change in this era of break-neck AI dynamism. 

Another nice thing about Cornell is that my email address vjz1@cornell.edu is a forever address that is also backed by a free Gmail account with storage

Go Big Red.

UW pulled its free Gmail and storage for my email vzimmer@uw.edu, although it still supports forwarding. And now IEEE is separately charging for its Gmail to keep vzimmer@ieee.org alive. Luckily ACM is maintaining its forwarding vincentzimmer@acm.org. This IEEE change coincides with Intel Retiree organization 'retiring' email forwarding, so I'm now losing vincent.zimmer@intelretiree.com too. Oh well.

The transient nature of email accounts reminds me of the ephemeral nature of the internet. I sometimes snap pictures of web sites I cite since as this blog ages the links end up going stale as content ages off the web.

OK.  Enough random editorial for a Saturday.  Back to work.