Today, Intel announced that the LF AI & Data Foundation Technical Advisory Council accepted Open Federated Learning (OpenFL) as an incubation project to further drive collaboration, standardization and interoperability. OpenFL is an open source framework for a type of distributed AI referred to as federated learning (FL) that incorporates privacy-preserving features called confidential computing. It was developed and hosted by Intel to help data scientists address the challenge of maintaining data privacy while bringing together insights from many disparate, confidential or regulated data sets.

"We are thrilled to welcome OpenFL to the LF AI & Data Foundation. This project's innovative approach to enabling organizations to collaboratively train machine learning models across multiple devices or data centers without the need to share raw data aligns perfectly with our mission to accelerate the growth and adoption of open source AI and data technologies. We look forward to collaborating with the talented individuals behind this project and helping to drive its success," said Dr. Ibrahim Haddad, executive director, LF AI & Data Foundation.

Nfina announces the addition of three new server systems to its lineup, customized for hybrid/multi-cloud, hyperconverged HA infrastructure, HPC, backup/disaster recovery, and business storage solutions. Featuring 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable Processors, Nfina-Store, and Nfina-View software, these scalable server systems fill a void in the marketplace, bringing exceptional multi-socket processing performance, easy-to-use management tools, built-in backup, and rapid disaster recovery.

"We know we must build systems for the business IT needs of today while planning for unknown future demands. Flexible infrastructure is key, optimized for hybrid/multi-cloud, backup/disaster recovery, HPC, and growing storage needs," says Warren Nicholson, President, and CEO of Nfina. He continues by saying, "Flexible infrastructure also means offering managed services like IaaS, DRaaS, etc., that provide customers with choices that fit the size of their application and budget - not a one size fits all approach like many of our competitors. Our goal is to serve many different business IT applications, any size, anywhere, at any time."

On Day 2 of Intel Innovation, Intel illustrated how its efforts and investments to foster an open ecosystem catalyze community innovation, from silicon to systems to apps and across all levels of the software stack. Through an expanding array of platforms, tools and solutions, Intel is focused on helping developers become more productive and more capable of realizing their potential for positive social good. The company introduced new tools to support developers in artificial intelligence, security and quantum computing, and announced the first customers of its new Project Amber attestation service.

"We are making good on our software-first strategy by empowering an open ecosystem that will enable us to collectively and continuously innovate," said Intel Chief Technology Officer Greg Lavender. "We are committed members of the developer community and our breadth and depth of hardware and software assets facilitate the scaling of opportunities for all through co-innovation and collaboration."

The x86 CPU family has been vulnerable to many attacks in recent years. With the arrival of Spectre and Meltdown, we have seen side-channel attacks overtake both AMD and Intel designs. However, today we find out that researchers are capable of exploiting Intel's latest 10th, 11th, and 12th generation Core processors with a new CPU bug called ÆPIC Leak. Named after Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller (APIC) that handles interrupt requests to regulate multiprocessing, the leak is claimeing to be the first "CPU bug able to architecturally disclose sensitive data." Researchers Pietro Borrello (Sapienza University of Rome), Andreas Kogler (Graz Institute of Technology), Martin Schwarzl (Graz), Moritz Lipp (Amazon Web Services), Daniel Gruss (Graz University of Technology), and Michael Schwarz (CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security) discovered this flaw in Intel processors.

ÆPIC Leak is the first CPU bug able to architecturally disclose sensitive data. It leverages a vulnerability in recent Intel CPUs to leak secrets from the processor itself: on most 10th, 11th and 12th generation Intel CPUs the APIC MMIO undefined range incorrectly returns stale data from the cache hierarchy. In contrast to transient execution attacks like Meltdown and Spectre, ÆPIC Leak is an architectural bug: the sensitive data gets directly disclosed without relying on any (noisy) side channel. ÆPIC Leak is like an uninitialized memory read in the CPU itself.

A privileged attacker (Administrator or root) is required to access APIC MMIO. Thus, most systems are safe from ÆPIC Leak. However, systems relying on SGX to protect data from privileged attackers would be at risk, thus, have to be patched.