Windows 10: Intel Unveils Project Athena Open Labs to Optimize Laptop Components

Brink · May 8, 2019

Josh Newman, Intel vice president and general manager of PC Innovation Segments in the Client Computing Group, shares details of Project Athena to 500 members of the PC ecosystem at the Project Athena Symposium and Workshop on May 8, 2019, in Taiwan. (Credit: Intel Corporation)

What’s New: Intel today revealed plans for Project Athena Open Labs in Taipei, Shanghai and Folsom, California, to support performance and low-power optimization of vendor components for laptops built to Project Athena design specifications and target experiences in 2020. Located in key ecosystem hubs and operated by teams of Intel engineers with system-on-chip (SOC) and platform power optimization expertise, the three Open Labs sites will begin operating in June 2019 to enable and optimize components.
“Across the industry, we each play an important role in delivering the advanced laptops of today and the future. Project Athena Open Labs are a critical step in enabling more extensive, day-to-day collaboration with the components ecosystem to continuously raise the bar for innovation across the platform.”
–Josh Newman, Intel vice president and general manager of PC Innovation Segments, Client Computing Group
What It Means: Intel’s expanded level of integration with the PC ecosystem will accelerate the development of advanced laptop designs and capabilities by adding greater efficiency to the component selection process for OEMs, and by enabling a continuous cycle of tuning and testing based on real workloads and usage models.

Why It’s Important: This week, more than 500 members of the PC ecosystem gathered in Taiwan for the Project Athena Ecosystem Symposium to ready the first wave of Project Athena designs. Announced at CES 2019, Intel’s innovation program, code-named “Project Athena,” was developed to help bring to market a new class of advanced laptops. Co-engineered with partners across the ecosystem, the first Project Athena devices will be available in the second half of this year.

With Project Athena, Intel has fundamentally changed its approach to innovation. Rooted in extensive research to understand how people use their devices and the challenges they face, Intel engineers and social scientists have developed a set of predefined key experience requirements designed to enable new experiences and capitalize on next-generation technologies, such as 5G and artificial intelligence, across the full PC platform.

Every component within a laptop affects the user experience, from power consumption to responsiveness and beyond. Enabling component vendor assessment, tuning and compliance at the Open Labs will help drive consistency in delivering the best technologies without compromise. Early alignment and enablement at the component level sets a strong foundation for OEM design readiness and implementation to help ensure systems meet Project Athena experience targets.

How It Works: Project Athena Open Labs will be the first step in readying the next wave of Project Athena designs for 2020 and beyond. Independent hardware vendors (IHVs) will have the opportunity to submit parts for compliance assessment via Project Athena Open Labs, and Intel’s OEM partners can also nominate preferred component vendors for participation.

Each lab is supported by experienced engineers to test, tune and provide recommendations to improve power and performance capabilities across a broad range of laptop components and categories, such as audio, display, embedded controllers, haptics, SSDs and wireless. The state-of-the-art facilities are located in regional hubs, so ODMs and IHVs can come into the labs year-round for component assessment and solution pathfinding aligned to the Project Athena vision. Following assessment, a list of optimized components will be made available to OEMs for consideration throughout product development cycles.

OEMs, ODMs and IHVs will begin to submit components to the Open Labs over the coming weeks.

More Context: Intel at 2019 Computex (Press Kit) | Intel at Computex 2019 (Media Alert) | Client Computing News

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Source: Intel Unveils Project Athena Open Labs, Expands Ecosystem Integration to Optimize Laptop Components | Intel Newsroom

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btarunr · May 8, 2019

Intel Labs Europe Inaugurates Innovation Open Lab in Ireland

Intel Labs Europe (ILE), unveiled the latest Innovation Open Lab located at the Intel Ireland campus in Leixlip Co. Kildare. This is Intel’s second European Innovation Open Lab, which will foster cooperation between Intel, industry and academia through joint research and innovation programs. The Lab’s mission is to facilitate and enhance open research and innovation opportunities in Europe that can be converted into various broadly based and value-driven technology solutions. The Ireland Innovation Open Lab is part of the ILE initiative which was announced in January 2009.

The official opening was attended by special guests including Conor Lenihan T.D., Minister for Science, Technology & Innovation; Brian Crowley, MEP; Rick Echevarria, Vice President, Digital Enterprise Group and General Manager, Digital Office Platform Division, Intel; Dr. Martin Curley, Global Director, Intel IT Innovation and Director, Intel Labs Europe; and Jim OHara, General Manager, Intel Ireland and Vice President, Technology Manufacturing Group, Intel.

Brian Crowley spoke about the importance of open research and innovation and the role companies and universities must play in driving Europe's vision of a Smart Economy. “I am delighted to see the launch of the Ireland Innovation Open Lab. I know first hand the full extent of Intel’s research collaborations across Europe and their ambitious plans to further these partnerships. The European Union's FP7 program is the key enabler for open research and innovation. I would like to thank Intel Labs Europe for supporting this initiative in Ireland and finally, I hope that today we are seeing a glimpse of Ireland's Smart Economy of the future.”

Martin Curley welcomed the Innovation Open Lab as the newest member of the Intel Labs Europe network and added, “Open Innovation is one of the most pervasive business trends of our time and we are pleased to announce the launch of the Ireland Innovation Open Lab which together with Open Lab Munich will act as portals for open innovation into Intel’s network of Labs in Europe. We are delighted to be collaborating with a wide range of customers, fellow travellers, academics and others to create new technologies and solutions that can advance Europe’s Innovation economy and information society”.

The Ireland Innovation Open Lab will host a critical mass of researchers engaged in FP7 research and innovation as well as joint innovation programs with European companies. It will also act as a showcase for leading edge research from across Europe. By the end of the year more than 30 high end researchers will be employed at the Open Lab working on open innovation supported by the EU Framework Program 7, putting Intel at the heart of European research.

Brink · May 8, 2019

Credential Guard lab companion

If you have heard about Credential Guard in Windows Server 2016 (and in Windows 10), but do not have an environment to try it out, here is a lab environment we built for you to play.

Lab access

The link will lead you to a sign up page, after that, you will see the following labs listed for Windows Server 2016:

Windows Server 2016 labs

There are 3 exercises in the “Implementing Breach Resistance Security in Windows Server 2016”:

Credential Guard

Remote Credential Guard

Device Guard

This blogpost will walk you through the Credential Guard lab details.

After click on the link of Breach Resistance lab, you be required to sign in and then you can launch the lab:

Sign-in

Launch page

It takes a few minutes to create the VMs, and once it has done, you will see the following machines prepared:

Initialize

DC: domain controller, which is not used for this exercise.

SRV01 and SRV02: both are Windows Server 2016, and used for the lab exercise.

Lab exercise – Explained

The steps are listed in the Content section:

Content

This lab is structured to cover the following in sequence:

Understand how attackers can use the hash in memory to gain access to domain controllers

Configure Credential Guard

Verify the hash in memory is protected using Credential Guard

You can follow the steps listed under the content section to complete the lab, the intent of the blog, is to break the procedures into groups, to help you understand the exercise better.

Prep the hash

Lsass.exe is the process which handles user logon, it stores the user credential information in its memory. The memory is cleared when the machine starts up. In this lab environment, all the virtual machines start at the time lab launches, when you logon to the machine, you will only have the logon user credential information in memory. In order to demonstrate an attacker gaining user access using other account’s hash, the first part of the lab is to simulate a server which has been running for a while, different users had remotely or locally connected to it, therefore, lsass memory stored many different user credential information.
This is accomplished by step 1-8.

Retrieving credential hash

Mimikatz is a popular tool for retrieving lsass memory information. The tool has been copied to the lab machines, step 9-13 walk you through the process of dumping lsass memory using Mimikatz.

Pass the Hash

Pass the hash is a hacking technique that allows an attacker to authenticate by using the underlying NTLM, instead of specifying the user password. In step 14 to 24, you will extract LabAdmin hash from lsass using Mimikatz, and use the hash to open a PowerShell console, and perform a couple of operations using the LabAdmin privilege:

Add a user to the domain admin group

Open remote PowerShell connection to a domain controller

Both operations could not be performed by the logon user. But using the hash of the LabAdmin, an attacker will be able to do it using the information retrieve from Lsass memory.

Configure and verify Credential Guard

Step 25 to 36 illustrate the steps to configure credential guard, then verify its status using msinfo32.exe and PowerShell.

Step 37 to 43 goes further to use Mimikatz to show the hash in Lsass is now encrypted using Credential Guard.

More info

The exercise illustrated the benefit of Credential Guard in Windows Server 2016 as well as Windows 10. For more information, you can find here.
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Source: Credential Guard lab companion Datacenter and Private Cloud Security Blog

See also:

Enable or Disable Credential Guard in Windows 10 Windows 10 Security System Tutorials

Verify if Credential Guard is Enabled or Disabled in Windows 10 Windows 10 Security System Tutorials

Divya Murugan · May 8, 2019

Disk optimization scheduling in Windows 10

Hi,

Welcome to Microsoft Community.

I suggest you to follow the below steps and check if it helps.

In search select Defragment and optimize drives

Click on change settings

In optimization schedule

In frequency select the options accordingly.

Please let us know if you need further assistance.

Thank you.

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Windows 10: Intel Unveils Project Athena Open Labs to Optimize Laptop Components

Intel Unveils Project Athena Open Labs to Optimize Laptop Components

Intel Unveils Project Athena Open Labs to Optimize Laptop Components

Intel Unveils Project Athena Open Labs to Optimize Laptop Components

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