Embedded Systems Weekly – Issue 75

Issue 75- 28 October 2016

Hardware

Engineers design ultralow power transistors that could function for years without a battery

A new design for transistors which operate on ‘scavenged’ energy from their environment could form the basis for devices which function for months or years without a battery, and could be used for wearable or implantable electronics.Share on Twitter ∙ Share on Facebook

Introduction to CPU Architecture

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App note: Between the Amplifier and the ADC – Managing filter loss in communications systems

This application report discusses managing filter loss in communications systems.Share on Twitter ∙ Share on Facebook

Software

Hajime: Analysis of a decentralized internet worm for IoT devices

This paper chronicles the discovery and analysis of a malicious internet worm, dubbed Hajime, which targets embedded/Internet of Things (“IoT”) devices and spreads by scanning the public internet for devices running Telnet servers with insecure default credentials. Though worms which target IoT devices are not new, they are rising in prominence lately due to the generally weak security such devices have. What makes Hajime unique is that it does not rely on centralized malware distribution server(s), but instead communicates over a distributed/decentralized overlay network to receive configuration and software updates.
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Dirty COW (CVE-2016-5195) Linux Kernel privilege escalation vulnerability

A race condition was found in the way the Linux kernel’s memory subsystem handled the copy-on-write (COW) breakage of private read-only memory mappings. All the information we have so far is included in this page.Share on Twitter ∙ Share on Facebook

Toyota: 81 514 issues in the code

A story about the fact that the software is penetrating more and more in our daily life. However, with the comfort and usefulness come new dangers. Now we deal with the bugs not only sitting at the computer, but driving on a road.Share on Twitter ∙ Share on Facebook

DTrace for Linux 2016

With the final major capability for BPF tracing (timed sampling) merging in Linux 4.9-rc1, the Linux kernel now has raw capabilities similar to those provided by DTrace, the advanced tracer from Solaris. As a long time DTrace user and expert, this is an exciting milestone! On Linux, you can now analyze the performance of applications and the kernel using production-safe low-overhead custom tracing, with latency histograms, frequency counts, and more.Share on Twitter ∙ Share on Facebook

Basic interpreter hidden in ESP32 silicon

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All-in-one script to build bleeding-edge-toolchain for ARM microcontrollers

As Freddie Chopin grew tired of solving problems caused by bizarre workflow of ARM employees and also realized that solving incompatibilities between various Linux distributions is probably impossible, he decided to make a next step. So he presents us a preview of a new all-in-one shell script for toolchain compilation, which is supposed to slightly change current form of bleeding-edge-toolchain.Share on Twitter ∙ Share on Facebook

Misc

Simulate your robot before you build it

Nurgak shows how one can use some of the great robotic tools out there to simulate a robot before you even build it. To drive this point home he builds the tutorial off of the easily 3D printable and buildable Robopoly platform.Share on Twitter ∙ Share on Facebook

Creating footprints from actual parts in KiCad

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Doorjam

Have you always dreamed of walking into a room to your own theme song? Us too—so we made a thing to do that! We call it Doorjam and it’s a boombox that plays your very own Spotify theme song when you walk through the door.Share on Twitter ∙ Share on Facebook

Photo by Miguel García