The march of time

As I read https://community.infoblox.com/t5/IPv6-CoE-Blog/Where-Are-You-On-The-IPv6-Adoption-Curve/ba-p/11116, I couldn't help but think of the progression of IPV6 support in UEFI.
We compared the adoption arc of the two efforts in
http://www.uefi.org/sites/default/files/resources/A_Tale_of_Two_Standards_0.pdf.

Interesting milestones on both the technology front https://tools.ietf.org/rfc/rfc5970.txt and in the specification uefi.org / codebase tianocore.org curation are shown below

In 2010 my colleague Bob Hale and I noted the following about Tiano www.tianocore.org

https://github.com/vincentjzimmer/Documents/blob/master/Neither-Seen-Nor-Heard.pdf.  9th generation in 2009.  Oh my.  Good thing we chose a different designation for the various types we snap EDKII trunk with the validated UDK releases https://github.com/tianocore/tianocore.github.io/wiki/UDK

Lots of changes these last few years. Another journey on this trip was meeting Paul Otellini in 2005. I was definitely saddened by the news https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/3/16411480/paul-otellini-death-intel-ceo

But change is part of the trip. I recently said good bye to my colleague Lee Leahy. He and I collaborated for several years and had the opportunity to co-present https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I08NHJLu6Us

To remind us that he has retired to Hawaii, he left the following picture in the cubicle behind mine, taken from his new backyard.

A final marker of the change occurred when cleaning out some data books. The right hand side (RHS) is the programmers reference manual (PRM) for the 386SX, whereas the left hand side (LHS) stack includes the reference tomes for an Intel based CPU's from a couple of years ago (prior to all documents going online-only).

An example of the change include the RHS PRM description of an instruction such as SCAS. The description even listed the number of clocks to retire the instruction, which was possible in the days of simpler memory hierarchies, in order execution, etc.

The following shows the same instruction from the LHS.

More modes.  No clocks.  As times change, instructions change.

I look forward to chatting with people on Sunday about UEFI and security https://firmwaresecurity.com/2017/10/10/uefi-security-presentation-at-seattle-dc206-meeting/. It's interesting to see this talk having been referenced in a few places, such as https://www.cylance.com/en_us/blog/black-hat-vegas-where-the-guardians-of-the-bios-are-failing.html, https://medium.com/@matrosov/bypass-intel-boot-guard-cc05edfca3a9,  https://www.darkreading.com/vulnerabilities---threats/7-hardware-and-firmware-hacks-highlighted-at-black-hat-2017/d/d-id/1329442?piddl_msgorder=&image_number=6, and https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2017/08/Titan-in-depth-security-in-plaintext.html, too.

Speaking of change, time to break away from the PC.

PS
Update from 10/18/2017
Thanks to the Lodge

for great questions and attendance this weekend

UEFI and Security postings

I was pleased to see https://firmwaresecurity.com/2017/05/25/intel-atr-releases-uefi-firmware-training-materials/ a few days ago and the associated Github repo https://github.com/advanced-threat-research/firmware-security-training. The authors include

I'm glad to see this material, including a couple of my co-authors from https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/woot15/woot15-paper-bazhaniuk.pdf.

Hopefully I will get a chance to talk with some of these ex-Intel, now-McAfee engineers at Blackhat. I see they are giving the talk https://www.blackhat.com/us-17/briefings.html#fractured-backbone-breaking-modern-os-defenses-with-firmware-attacks. Myself and a couple of colleagues are giving a separate talk at the event https://www.blackhat.com/us-17/briefings.html#firmware-is-the-new-black-analyzing-past-three-years-of-bios-uefi-security-vulnerabilities.

Interesting timing since it was in 2007 that I sat on the front row watching John Heasman https://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-usa-07/Heasman/Presentation/bh-usa-07-heasman.pdf talk about "Hacking the Extensible Firmware Interface." This was my first Blackhat trek a decade ago. I had coffee why John a few weeks afterward in Tacoma and he exhorted me to push the signing of UEFI drivers and applications. He also mentioned the venerable TCG specs on page 37.

Good times. Fast forward to today, UEFI seems to be in the news http://www.itworld.com/article/3198647/security/6-reasons-why-chip-hacks-will-become-more-popular-in-the-future.html and conference scene quite a bit of late.

Beyond the training material and upcoming conference talks, though, I am especially happy to see the NIST Special Publications (SP) 800-193 on "Platform Firmware Resiliency Guidelines" get posted http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/drafts/800-193/sp800-193-draft.pdf for purposes of public comment review. This work should complements the UEFI standards in provides a robust platform implementation. As always, the people involved in the process are as important as the output of the process itself.

So much for May blogging, and here's looking forward to a WA summer. Speaking of summer, it is interesting that the picture of Stevenson, WA from last week

looks quite similar to a picture from 2005, too.

The passage of time......