Intel | Linuxaria

Monitoring via IPMI

Jul 182012

Original article by http://janssenlima.blogspot.it/ in Portuguese

Today I’ll talk about a very important type of monitoring that is rarely discussed (perhaps because not so many people are privileged to work with hardware that supports this technology: IPMI).

The Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) is a standard used to manage a computer system and monitor its operation. Its development was led by Intel and is today supported by more than 200 hardware manufacturers.
Its operation is independent of an operating system, which allows administrators to remotely manage the hardware resources even before any OS starts. For example, we can monitor through IPMI system temperatures, voltages, fans (FAN), power supplies, chassis intrusion, etc..
For the ones that wants to go deeper in IPMI specifics, I suggest reading the website of Intel . I think the most interested in this are the Data Center Managers and System Administrators of sites that must be highly available. An IPMI interface collects information using sensors that are responsible for providing this information in real-time.
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Protect Linux from cold boot attacks with TRESOR

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Apr 052012

While reading an interesting Blog I discovered a new treasure: TRESOR, in short TRESOR is a secure implementation of AES which is resistant against cold boot attacks and other attacks on main memory.

If like me you wonder what a cold boot attack is, Princeton University can help us :

Contrary to popular assumption, DRAMs used in most modern computers retain their contents for seconds to minutes after power is lost, even at operating temperatures and even if removed from a motherboard. Although DRAMs become less reliable when they are not refreshed, they are not immediately erased, and their contents persist sufficiently for malicious (or forensic) acquisition of usable full-system memory images. This phenomenon limits the ability of an operating system to protect cryptographic key material from an attacker with physical access. We use cold reboots to mount attacks on popular disk encryption systems — BitLocker, FileVault, dm-crypt, and TrueCrypt — using no special devices or materials. We experimentally characterize the extent and predictability of memory remanence and report that remanence times can be increased dramatically with simple techniques.