News briefs for March 21, 2018.
Google announced several new security features for its Cloud Platform today, including the Google Security Command Center, VPC Service Controls[1] and Cloud Armor[2]. For more details, see the reports on GeekWire[3], Wired[4] and TechCrunch[5].
U-Boot 2018.03 has been released, and it now includes iSCSI support, which allows you to "share complete disks or partitions via the network". See the Phoronix article[6] and Xypron's "iSCSI booting with U-Boot and iPXE"[7] for more details.
Saleem Rashid, a 15-year-old from the UK, successfully backdoored the supposedly tamper-proof Leger cryptocurrency hardware wallet yesterday: "the stealth backdoor...is a minuscule 300-bytes long and causes the device to generate pre-determined wallet addresses and recovery passwords known to the attacker. The attacker could then enter those passwords into a new Ledger hardware wallet to recover the private keys the old backdoored device stores for those addresses." See his blog post[8] and the Ars Technica report[9] for the whole story.
Announced this week at the Game Developers Conference, you'll soon be able try games before installing them on your Android device with Google Play Instant. It's still in closed beta, but should be "opening more broadly" later this year: "it provides a collection of extensions to the instant apps framework that better support the needs of game developers; including a higher APK size limit to 10MB, progressive download support for executable code and game assets, and support for NDK and game engines using existing tool chains." See the Android Developers Blog[10] for more details.
Chrome OS 65 has moved to the stable channel[11], and the build contains many bug fixes and security updates, including "Intel devices on 3.14 kernels received the KPTI mitigation against Meltdown with