AMD's ZEN to Implement Advanced Security Features not found in Intel's solutions

[FordGT90Concept]

I was looking closer at that picture and it looked familiar...

AMD Beema

That's not Zen so, either the picture is bull or Beema already has this feature and it's not new to Zen.

 

[Arnulf]

I was looking closer at that picture and it looked familiar...

AMD Beema

That's not Zen so, either the picture is bull or Beema already has this feature and it's not new to Zen.

This is correct, Puma-based SoCs (Beema/Mullins) contain TrustZone Cortex CPU as well. Zen will be the first high performance chip to employ this though (for server/high end desktop market).

 

[Raevenlord]

As a first post I'd say good job && well done! A comprehensive and well-rounded post, I'd say.
But as a news post it kinda fails, as this information has been known for well over a half a year now – ever since AMD pushed those patches to the linux kernel, implementing support for these features. xP
Either way, hope to see more of Your posts soon, as You really seem to have a knack for writing good, comprehensive and detailed articles.

Thanks for the kind words, Vinska!
Yeah, as a news post, it's kinda more like old-news

That said, I found the info and the technology interesting and potentially game-changing, so I tried to give it a relatively detailed, yet simple breakdown of what to expect and how it works.

 

[john_]

But Yahoo owned those email servers ... unless I misunderstood something, memory encryption has no bearing on that story.

The reason I mentioned Yahoo! is because news like this, will make enterprises more worried about their sensible data stored on the cloud. When you see a big, old and established company like Yahoo!, spying it's customers emails, the first thing you will do if you are an enterprise is to lose part of your trust to your cloud service provider, even if until now you had absolute trust to that provider. And you don't have to be a terrorist or a criminal to worry about that. Industrial espionage is something totally real and happening every day between companies and countries.

 

[tehehe]

It could be used to implement very hard to crack DRM schemes as well...

 

[librin.so.1]

It could be used to implement very hard to crack DRM schemes as well...

actually, no not really: the memory encryption feature hides information from memory contents leaking to outside of the OS controlled domain, but keeps it fully accessible within it – it has to for normal operation of the computer. So it can't and won't, e.g. hide the memory from a driver running within the OS on ring 0.
Same for encrypted virtualization: it won't hide the information from the host itself.
The only way I can see DRM being implemented with this is having a DRM-protected application running in a an encrypted virtual machine. For one kind of DRM, the stuff for games, which want to use "actual graphics", it's helluva problematic. While for the other kind of DRM, music and movies, that just introduces a problem of "we still need to get the decrypted content outside of the VM, to the hypervisor / underlying OS, so it could actually present it to the user."

And even if someone finds some convulated way to make use of these for DRM, due to the nature of the tech and since these both features interact with the OSes running on the hardware in a non-trivial way, it's simply an option one can, nay, has to be able to disable before boot. (Or more like, have to be explicitly enabled by the user before boot, likely in the form of BIOS/UEFI/whatever settings, lest all hell breaks loose if the software doesn't support it)

[...]
That's not Zen so, either the picture is bull or Beema already has this feature and it's not new to Zen.

What these had/have is called a TrustedZone, which is this just slightly useful thing mainly used by ARM platforms, which AMD licensed from aforementioned ARM.
What Zen is getting is this plus a whole lotta more and these additional features are not provided nor available on the TrustedZone dohicky.

 

[Jism]

Sounds neat, but has physical server security been an issue? But, it does impart that warm and fuzzy feeling, it's a good server feature.

From what i can think of, lets say your website gets hacked, malware is being installed, and it's trying to monitor for user passes, root passes and all that stuff. Basicly what this does is encrypt the contents of the memory and make it useless for readout.

Simular happens on PC, where malware esp. for Windows trying to grab bank details, would technically be encrypted making it useless. Malware is these days so sophisticated that it does'nt need any user input at all. It just sits and monitors what is going in and outside the memory for example.