Month: November 2021

Enlarge (credit: VGG | Getty Images)

The British government has launched an in-depth investigation into Nvidia’s takeover of the UK-based technology company Arm on national security grounds, throwing another hurdle in the path of the $54 billion deal.

Digital and culture secretary Nadine Dorries has ordered a phase 2 investigation into the transaction on public interest grounds, meaning it will now be subject to a full-blown probe into antitrust and security issues. The UK competition watchdog uncovered “serious competition concerns” with the deal in July.

In a letter to the parties published on Tuesday, the government said: “The secretary of state believes that the ubiquity of Arm technology makes the accessibility and reliability of Arm IP necessary for national security.”

Humans have lived aboard the International Space Station for more than two decades. (credit: NASA)

A day after it launched a missile and blasted a large satellite into hundreds of thousands of pieces of debris, the Russian Defense Ministry has acknowledged the test but said it posed no danger to humans living in space.

"On November 15, the Defense Ministry of Russia successfully conducted a test, in which the Russian defunct Tselina-D satellite in orbit since 1982 was struck," the statement issued on Tuesday said. "The United States knows for certain that the emerging fragments at the time of the test and in terms of the orbit’s parameters did not and will not pose any threat to orbital stations, satellites and space activity."

The statement was issued about 24 hours after NASA, European, and Russian astronauts on board the International Space Station, out of concern for a potential collision with "new debris," scrambled into their Crew Dragon and Soyuz spacecraft. They sheltered there for about two hours in case an emergency escape was necessitated by a debris strike.

Enlarge (credit: Intel)

Intel is fixing a vulnerability that unauthorized people with physical access can exploit to install malicious firmware on the chip to defeat a variety of measures, including protections provided by Bitlocker, trusted platform modules, anti-copying restrictions, and others.

The vulnerability—present in Pentium, Celeron, and Atom CPUs on the Apollo Lake, Gemini Lake, and Gemini Lake Refresh platforms—allows skilled hackers with possession of an affected chip to run it in debug and testing modes used by firmware developers. Intel and other chipmakers go to great lengths to prevent such access by unauthorized people.

Once in developer mode, an attacker can extract the key used to encrypt data stored in the TPM enclave and, in the event TPM is being used to store a Bitlocker key, defeat that latter protection as well. An adversary could also bypass code-signing restrictions that prevent unauthorized firmware from running in the Intel Management Engine, a subsystem inside vulnerable CPUs, and from there permanently backdoor the chip.