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There have been numerous investigations into the use of the Performance Monitoring Counters (PMCs) for malware detection. Below is a quick survey of what Iโ€™ve read so far, as well as an investigation into using JTAG as an alternative access mechanism to traditional ring 0 or restricted OS mechanisms.
In this installment of the Coding to the SED API series, weโ€™ll look at the SED functions that access the OOBMSM, and use it for super-fast retrieval of hardware telemetry data.
For each of the months of January, February and March, I did a webinar on JTAG-based debugging. Since each of the video recordings are about 45 minutes long, I thought it would be helpful to point out the highlights of each, if you donโ€™t have time to sit through the full durations. At the risk of sounding immodest, there are some real gems of information within the demos of each webinar.
Beginning with Microsoft Azure's Project Olympus, and now a standard within the Open Compute Project, many datacenter servers are now optionally equipped with hardware connectivity between the platform BMC and CPU scan chain. The BMC can thus act as an autonomous JTAG-based embedded out-of-band debug agent, provide low-level triage of system events, such as crashes and hangs. Other use cases, such as hardware validation, manufacturing test, and forensics telemetry are also enabled by this technology.
Don't miss it! ASSET's Alan Sguigna (that's me), in collaboration with the UEFI Forum, will be presenting and demonstrating SourcePoint using the Intel Architectural Event Trace (AET) feature, which offers an unparalleled level of insight into x86 event generation and code execution.
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