Page 36 - EngineerIT December 2021

INDUSTRY, TECHNOLOGY, PRODUCTS and INNOVATION you want to read about

Africa Data Centres outlines major facilities are an integral part of the expansion,
as South Africa is one of the key data centre
expansion plans in Johannesburg markets in Africa, and a gateway for smaller

neighbouring markets.
In September the company announced
frica Data Centres, a Cassava Technologies business and the continent’s leading plans to build large hyperscale data centres
carrier-neutral co-location data centre provider, has expanded its capacity in throughout Africa, including the North African
AJohannesburg with the opening of a new state-of-the-art 10 MW capacity data countries of Morocco, Tunisia and Egypt.
centre in Midrand. At a media briefing, CEO Stephane Duproz, said this is the beginning The project will involve building 10
of a major expansion programme to expand its hyper-scale and enterprise focused hyperscale data centres, in 10 countries, over
data centres at its existing campuses in Midrand and Samrand. The company is also in the next two years – at a cost of more than
the process of securing land for a third location to expand its data centre presence in US$500m. It is being funded through new
Johannesburg to 100 MW. equity and facilities from leading development
Africa Data Centres has set aside $500m to enable the company to more than finance institutions and multilateral
double its already significant footprint in Africa, which will boost digital transformation organisations. Duproz explained that the
on the continent. finance for the roll-out has been provided by
According to Duproz, the plans announced for Africa Data Centres’ Johannesburg equity and loans to Africa Data Centres’ parent
company, Liquid Intelligent Technologies, to
fully fund the expansion.
Explaining the ambitious initiative, Duproz
says, “We have already begun to acquire land
in these countries and plan to roll-out very
quickly to meet the needs of our existing and
new customers. This is just the beginning for
us.” The expansion will more than double Africa
Data Centres already significant footprint on the
continent.
“Examining Africa’s growth trajectory has
allowed us to make investment decisions on new
locations and confidently commit to expanding
selected existing locations, resulting in the largest
New Africa Data Centres facility in Midrand
investment of its kind in history,” Duproz said.

Check Point Research discovers vulnerabilities in smartphones

chips embedded in 37% of smartphones around the world

aiwan’s MediaTek has been the global smartphone chip from the Android user space. The goal of our research was to find a
leader since Q3 2020. MediaTek Systems on a chip (SoCs) are way to attack the audio DSP from an Android phone.
Tembedded in approximately 37% of all smartphones and IoT A malformed inter-processor message could potentially be
devices in the world, including high-end phones from Xiaomi, Oppo, used by an attacker to execute and hide malicious code inside the
Realme, Vivo and more. DSP firmware. Since the DSP firmware has access to the audio data
Modern MediaTek SoCs, including the latest Dimensity series, flow, an attack on the DSP could potentially be used to eavesdrop
contain a special AI processing unit (APU) and audio Digital signal on the user. By chaining with vulnerabilities in Original equipment
processor (DSP) to improve media performance and reduce CPU manufacturer (OEM) partner’s libraries, the MediaTek security issues
usage. Both the APU and the audio DSP have custom Tensilica Xtensa we found could lead to local privilege escalation from an Android
microprocessor architecture. The Tensilica processor platform allows application.
chip manufacturers to extend the base Xtensa instruction set with The discovered vulnerabilities in the DSP firmware (CVE-2021-
custom instructions, to optimise particular algorithms and prevent 0661, CVE-2021-0662, CVE-2021-0663) have already been fixed
them from being copied. This fact makes MediaTek DSP a unique and and published in the October 2021 MediaTek Security Bulletin. The
challenging target for security research. security issue in the MediaTek audio HAL (CVE-2021-0673) was fixed
In this study, we reverse-engineered the MediaTek audio DSP in October and will be published in the December 2021 MediaTek
firmware and discovered several vulnerabilities that are accessible Security Bulletin.

EngineerIT | December 2021 | 34