While there are many existing technologies to frustrate remote attackers, it can be fun to think up novel protections that might be used to layer on additional defences.
Consider, for instance, that remote code execution through attacks like buffer overflows depends on knowledge of the remote systems' instruction set. Knowledge …
A very meta photo of me at the Toronto Bitcoin Developer Meetup yesterday, explaining moxie, and the value of a security oriented VM (moxiebox).
Photo used by permission from Jan Miranda.
Moxie was assigned an official ELF machine number this week! You can check it out here: http://www.sco.com/developers/gabi/latest/ch4.eheader.html.
All ELF files start with a header describing properties of the object at hand. One of the most important properties is the 'machine' type …
The bitcoin team has been exercising moxie in ways that it hasn't been stressed before. For example, they've been examining the code quality for their crypto libraries like libsecp256k1, an elliptical curve crypto library in C. One of their first feedbacks here was that moxie provides no native way to …
It's been a while since my last update.. let me bring you up to speed.
A couple of libffi releases got in the way of moxie hacking (although libffi 3.0.13 now includes full moxie support!), but things are picking up speed again.
On the software side of things …
I've just committed the bits required to run a C program on the Marin SoC.
Rather than hook up the Nexys3 external RAM module, I'm using extra space on the FPGA itself for RAM. Most of the hard work was sorting out the linker script magic required to generate an …
Brad Robinson just sent me this awesome shot of MoxieLite in action. His Xilinx Spartan-6 FPGA based SoC features a moxie core handling VGA video, keyboard and FAT-on-flash filesystem duties using custom firmware written in C. This is all in support of a second z80-based core on the same FPGA …
There's a working hardware implementation of moxie in the wild!
Intrepid hacker Brad Robinson created this moxie-compatible core as a peripheral controller for his SoC. He had been using a simple 8-bit core, but needed to address more memory than was possible with the 8-bit part. Moxie is a nice …
The hacker behind the Minecraft phenomena, Notch, is working on his next game, most likely another hit. This one is interesting in that it includes an in-game 16-bit processor called the dcpu-16. Details are sparse, but it seems as though gamers will use this processor to control spacecraft and play …
The thing about GCC is that things break when you take your eye off the ball. And this is what happened during my months long hiatus from the moxie project. Somewhere between early March and today, the moxie GCC port lost the ability to compile non-trivial code, notably libgcc. Firing …