It should be no surprise in the current climate that the US government is ramping up investment in microelectronics security, particularly with an eye on China and investments they are making in the same area. This has two major thrusts as I read it: to ensure trusted and assured microelectronics are being used in US defense systems… Read More
Cryptocurrency Exchange Hacks are on the Rise
Seven major cryptocurrency exchanges were victimized in 2019, totaling over $160 million in financial theft. As predicted, cybercriminal hackers targeted crypto exchanges in 2019 and the trend will continue into 2020.
Crypto exchanges are relatively new, as compared to those in the traditional financial markets. It is
NXP Pushes GHz Performance in Crossover MCU
I first heard about NXP crossover MCUs at the 2017 TechCon. I got another update at this year’s TechCon, this time their progress on performance and capability in this family. They’ve been ramping performance – a lot – now to a gigahertz, based on a dual-core architecture, M7 and M4. They position this as between 2 and 9X faster than… Read More
Cadence and Green Hills Share More Security Thoughts at ARM Techcon
On Wednesday, October 9, 2019, I had the pleasure of spending the day at ARM Techcon at the San Jose Convention Center. In the morning, in addition to getting some sneak peeks into the exhibitor area, I attended some of the morning keynote presentations, which focused on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) topics.… Read More
Accellera IP Security Standard: A Start
I mentioned some time ago (a DVCon or two ago) that Accellera had started working on a standard to quantify IP security. At the time I talked about some of the challenges in the task but nevertheless applauded the effort. You’ve got to start somewhere and some way to quantify this is better than none, as long as it doesn’t deliver misleading… Read More
Criminals Luring in Bitcoin Sellers to Launder Money
Cybercriminals are luring in bitcoin holders with the promise of easy money if they become a mule to convert stolen assets into clean currency. The reality is these volunteers will just join the ranks of other victims. But that is not stopping people from joining up to replace other mules who have paid the price.
Criminals are selling… Read More
Major Drone Attack Against Global Oil Production Showcases Weak Cybersecurity Thinking
Drones attacked an oil processing facility last week and shut down half of all Saudi capacity, representing about 5% of the world’s daily oil production. We have seen how a botnet of compromised home appliances can take down a sizeable chunk of the internet, control structures of electricity and other critical infrastructures… Read More
NATO’s Collective Defense for Cyber Attack Remains Fragile
The Secretary-General of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg, stated all 29 member countries would respond to a serious cyberattack against any of the nations in the coalition. The pressing question is will NATO work together with combined forces when one of the members is attacked in an asymmetrical manner with digital technology?
When… Read More
Cryptocurrencies Should be Enabled to Blacklist Criminal Holdings
Cryptocurrency is seen as a new, wild, reckless, revolutionary, and sometimes shady financial instrument. In addition to legitimate transactions, a disproportionate amount of attention is paid to the criminal use of cryptocurrency to store wealth, collect payments, transfer illicit funds, and launder money. Malicious
Build More and Better Tests Faster
Breker has been in the system test synthesis game for 12 years, starting long before there was a PSS standard. Which means they probably have this figured out better than most, quite simply because they’ve seen it all and done it all. Breker is heavily involved in and aligned with the standard of course but it shouldn’t be surprising… Read More


Website Developers May Have Most to Fear From AI