Facebook Plans to Build Its Own Chips For Hardware Devices

Facebook Plans to Build Its Own Chips For Hardware Devices

A new job opening post on Facebook suggests that the social network is forming a team to build its own hardware chips, joining other tech titans like Google, Apple, and Amazon in becoming more self-reliant.

According to the post, Facebook is looking for an expert in ASIC and FPGA—two custom silicon designs to help it evaluate, develop and drive next-generation technologies within Facebook—particularly in artificial intelligence and machine learning.

The social media company is seeking to hire an expert who can "an end-to-end SoC/ASIC, firmware and driver development organization, including all aspects of front-end and back-end standard cell ASIC development," reads the job listing on Facebook's corporate website.SoC (system-on-a-chip) is a processor typically used in mobile devices with all the components required to power a device, while ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) is a customized piece of silicon designed for a narrow purpose that companies can gear toward something specific, like mining cryptocurrency.

FPGA (field programmable gate array) is an adaptable chip designed to be a more flexible and modular design that can be tuned to speed up specific jobs by running a particular piece of software.

First reported by Bloomberg, building its own processors would help the social media giant reduce dependency on companies such as Qualcomm and Intel, who hold the lion's share of the processor market.

Reportedly Apple, who already makes its own A-series custom chips for iPhones, iPads and other iThings, has planned to use its custom-designed ARM chips in Mac computers starting as early as 2020, replacing the Intel processors running on its desktop and laptop hardware.Google has also developed its own artificial intelligence chip, and Amazon is reportedly designing its custom hardware to improve Alexa-equipped devices.

The plan to invest in building its own processors could help Facebook to power its artificial intelligence software, servers in its data centers, as well as its future hardware devices, like Oculus virtual reality headsets and smart speakers (similar to Amazon Echo and Google Home).

Using its custom chips would also allow the social media company to gain more control over its own hardware roadmap better and eventual feature set to offer better performance to its users.

Facebook has not commented on the news yet, so at this time, it is hard to say where the company will deploy its in-house chips.

How to Steal Bitcoin Wallet Keys (Cold Storage) from Air-Gapped PCs

How to Steal Bitcoin Wallet Keys (Cold Storage) from Air-Gapped PCs

Dr. Mordechai Guri, the head of R&D team at Israel's Ben Gurion University, who previously demonstrated various methods to steal data from an air-gapped computer, has now published new research named "BeatCoin."

BeatCoin is not a new hacking technique; instead, it's an experiment wherein the researcher demonstrates how all previously discovered out-of-band communication methods can be used to steal private keys for a cryptocurrency wallet installed on cold storage, preferably an air-gapped computer or Raspberry Pi.

For those unaware, keeping your cryptocurrency protected in a wallet on a device which is entirely offline is called cold storage. Since online digital wallets carry different security risks, some people prefer keeping their private keys offline.Air-gapped computers are those that are isolated from the Internet, local networks, Bluetooth and therefore, are believed to be the most secure devices and are difficult to infiltrate or exfiltrate.

If you are new to this topic, we recommend reading our previous articles, detailing how highly-motivated attackers can use specially designed malware to exfiltrate data from an air-gapped computer via light, sound, heat, electromagnetic, magnetic, infrared, and ultrasonic waves.For BeatCoin experiment, Dr. Guri deployed malware on an air-gapped computer that runs a Bitcoin wallet application and then performed each attack vector one-by-one to transmit the wallet keys to a nearby device over covert channels.

"In the adversarial attack model, the attacker infiltrates the offline wallet, infecting it with malicious code," the paper [PDF] reads. "The malware can be pre-installed or pushed in during the initial installation of the wallet, or it can infect the system when removable media (e.g., USB flash drive) is inserted into the wallet’s computer in order to sign a transaction. These attack vectors have repeatedly been proven feasible in the last decade."

Results shown in the above chart suggests AirHopper, MOSQUITO, and Ultrasonic techniques are the fastest way to transmit a 256-bit private key to a remote receiver, whereas, Diskfiltration and Fansmitter methods take minutes.Guri has also shared two videos. The first one demonstrates exfiltration of private keys from an air-gapped computer, which hardly took a few seconds to transmit data to a nearby smartphone using ultrasonic waves.

n the second video, the researcher transmitted private keys stored on a Raspberry Pi device to the nearby smartphone using the RadIoT attack—a technique to exfiltrate data from air-gapped internet-of-things (IoT) and embedded devices via radio signals.

"The radio signals - generated from various buses and general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins of the embedded devices - can be modulated with binary data. In this case, the transmissions can be received by an AM or FM receiver located nearby the device."

In the last research published earlier this month, Guri’s team also demonstrated how hackers could use power fluctuations in the current flow "propagated through the power lines" to covertly exfiltrate highly sensitive data out of an air gapped-computer.