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4 stories in the last 3d

You Shall Not Pass into Ring-0! A User Privacy-Friendly Anti-Cheat Architecture for Personal Computers

Tirith replaces invasive kernel-level game anti-cheats with protected VMs and a dual-trusted virtualization monitor, preserving detection and near-native performance.

Researchers present Tirith, an anti-cheat architecture that runs video games in Protected Virtual Machines, sandboxing computations from untrusted root admins, and uses a virtualization monitor trusted by both players and developers to watch for malicious drivers. This removes the need for privacy-invasive ring-0 kernel anti-cheat components while matching their protection against a wide range of cheating mechanisms. To overcome VM stack limitations, the work contributes a security-focused Library OS kernel for games and an efficient graphics sharing pipeline for near-native rendering performance.

arXiv cs.CR · 1d agoResearch

Evaluating the NIST Bugs Framework Against CWE as a Successor for Automated Vulnerability Classification

NIST Bugs Framework evaluation shows it is more structured and automation-friendly than CWE for automated vulnerability classification, with gaps in attribute guidance.

The paper evaluates NIST SP 800-231's Bugs Framework (BF) against CWE as a target for automated CVE classification using a systematically screened corpus of CVE-to-CWE research. An inter-rater study with 2 subject-matter experts mapping 13 CVEs showed strong agreement on BF's cause and operation axes but only fair agreement on the attribute axis. Automated classification was tested across two LLM deployments under different budgets, and findings support BF as more structured and automation-friendly than CWE, though gaps include under-specified attribute guidance and missing fix commits for closed-source software.

arXiv cs.CR · 2d agoResearch1

Building a Linux GPU Driver for the M4 Mac Mini in One Month

Two developers built a fully OpenGL ES 3.0 compliant Linux GPU driver for the M4 Mac Mini in one month via clean-room reverse engineering.

Niklas and the author reverse engineered Apple's AGX GPU firmware ABI and user-space components in about a month, a process that normally takes years, producing an OpenGL ES 3.0 conformant driver fast enough to run Minecraft at 200fps on an M4 Mac Mini. The work was done transparently using hypervisor traces without examining Apple binaries, following clean-room practices, and included a custom shader compiler, command stream builder, and a full Linux kernel driver for the firmware ABI. The A18 Pro firmware ABI proved significantly more complex than the M1's, with 1.5x as many structs and twice as many pointers. All experiments and provenance evidence were published in public agx-re repositories.

Can We Stop The Ads? Taxonomy and Characterization of Smartphone Splash Ads and Existing Countermeasures

Study of 108 ad-defense implementations finds only one tool blocked splash-ad navigation across ten popular apps, and it required Accessibility permission.

The paper taxonomizes smartphone splash ads — full-screen ads at app launch that trick users into trigger mechanisms such as moving the phone — and analyzes 108 documented advertising defenses for deployment barriers. Many defenses require device rooting, jailbreaking, runtime code injection, or application modification; others need extra permissions, rule maintenance, compilation, or payment. In evaluating 13 configurations of 11 tools across 10 popular apps, only one prevented ad-triggered navigation across all ten apps, requiring Accessibility permission and leaving ads visible roughly one second before dismissal. Documented harms include delayed emergency response, driver distraction, and degraded accessibility for vision-impaired users.

arXiv cs.CR · 1d agoResearch