Posting on behalf of Prashanth Yerramilli

When we launched Azure Key Vault a few years ago, it solved a major problem users had which was that storing sensitive and/or secret information in code or config files in plain text causes multiple problems including security exposure. Users stored their secrets in a safe store like Key Vault and used a URI to fetch the secret material. This service has been wildly popular and has become a standard for cloud applications. It is used by fledling startups to Fortune 500 companies world over.

Developers use Key Vault to store their adhoc secrets, certificates and keys used for encryption. And to follow best security practices they create secrets that are short lived. An example of typical flow in this case could be

• Step 1: Developer creates a certificate in Key Vault
• Step 2: Developer sets the lifetime of the secret to be 30 day. In other words developer asks Key Vault to re-create the certificate every 30 days. Developer also chooses to receive an email when a certificate is about to expire
• Step 3: Developer writes a polling service to check if the certificate has indeed expired

In the above scenario there are few challenges for the customer. They would have to write a polling service that constantly checks if the certificate has expired and if so they wait for the new certificate and then bind it in Windows Certificate manager.
Now what if developer doesn’t have to poll. And also if the developer doesn’t have to bind the new certificate in Windows Certificate manager. To solve this exact problem we built a Key Vault Virtual Machine Extension.

Azure virtual machine (VM) extensions are small applications that provide post-deployment configuration and automation tasks on Azure VMs. For example, if a virtual machine requires software installation, anti-virus protection, or to run a script inside of it, a VM extension can be used. Azure VM extensions can be run with the Azure CLI, PowerShell, Azure Resource Manager templates, and the Azure portal. Extensions can be bundled with a new VM deployment, or run against any existing system.
To learn more about VM Extensions please click here

Key Vault VM Extension is supposed to do just that as explained in the steps below

• Step 1: Create a Key Vault and create an Azure Windows Virtual Machine
• Step 2: Install the Key Vault VM Extension on the VM
• Step 3: Configure Key Vault VM Extension to monitor a specific vault by specifying how often it should fetch the certificate

By doing the above steps the latest certificate is bound correctly in Windows Certificate Manager. This feature enables auto-rotation of SSL certificates, without necessitating a re-deployment or binding.

In the lifecycle of secrets management fetching the latest version of the secret (for the purpose of this article a certificate) is just as important as storing it securely. To solve this problem, on an Azure Virtual Machine, we’ve created a VM Extension for Windows. A Linux version is coming soon.
Virtual Machine Extensions are small applications that provide post-deployment configuration and automation tasks on Azure VMs. In this case the Key Vault Virtual Machine extension once installed fetches the latest version of the certificate at a specified interval and automatically binds the latest version of the certificate in the certificate store on Windows. As you can see this feature enables auto-rotation of SSL certificates, without necessitating a re-deployment or binding.

Also before we begin going through the tutorial, we need to understand a concept called Managed Identities.
Your code needs credentials to authenticate to cloud services, but you want to limit the visibility of those credentials as much as possible. Ideally, they never appear on a developer’s workstation or get checked-in to source control. Azure Key Vault can store credentials securely so they aren’t in your code, but to retrieve them you need to authenticate to Azure Key Vault. To authenticate to Key Vault, you need a credential! A classic bootstrap problem. Through the magic of Azure and Azure AD, MI provides a “bootstrap identity” that makes it much simpler to get things started.

Here’s how it works: When you enable MI for an Azure resource such as a virtual machine, Azure creates a Service Principal (an identity) for that resource in Azure AD, and injects the credentials (of that identity) into the resource (in this case a virtual machine).

1. Your code calls a local MI endpoint to get an access token
2. MI uses the locally injected credentials to get an access token from Azure AD
3. Your code uses this access token to authenticate to an Azure service

Now within Managed Identities there are 2 types

1. System Assigned managed identity is enabled directly on an Azure service instance. When the identity is enabled, Azure creates an identity for the instance in the Azure AD tenant that’s trusted by the subscription. The lifecycle of the identity is managed by Azure and is tied to the Azure service instance.
2. User Assigned managed identity is created as a standalone Azure resource. Users first create an identity and then assign that identity to one or more Azure resources.

In this tutorial I will demonstrate how to create a Azure Virtual Machine with an ARM template which also includes creating a Key Vault VM Extension on the VM.

Prerequisites

Step 1

After the prerequisites are complete, create an System Assigned identity by following this tutorial

Step 2

Assign the newly created System Assigned identity to access to your Key Vault

• Go to https://portal.azure.com and navigate to your Key Vault
• Select Access Policies section and Add New by searching for the User Assigned identity
  

Step 3

Create or Update a VM with the following ARM template
You can view full the ARM template here and the ARM Parameters file here.

The most minimal settings in the ARM template are shown below:

 {
 "secretsManagementSettings": {
 "observedCertificates": [
 "<KeyVault URI of a secret to be monitored/retrieved, in versionless format: https://myVaultName.vault.azure.net/secrets/myCertName">,
 "<more entries here>", 
 "pollingIntervalInS": "[parameters('kvvmextPollingInterval')]",
 ]
 }
 }

As you can see we only specify the observedCertificates parameter and polling Interval in seconds

Note: Your observedCertificates urls should be of the form:

https://myVaultName.vault.azure.net/secrets/myCertName 





and not:





https://myVaultName.vault.azure.net/cert...myCertName 





Reason being the /secrets path returns the full certificate, inluding the private key, while the /certificates path does not.

By following this tutorial you can create a VM with the above specified template

The above tutorial assumes that you are storing your certificates on Windows Certificate Manager. And so the VM Extension pulls down the latest certificates at a specified interval and automatically binds those certificates in your certificate manager.

That’s all folks!

Linux Version: We’re actively working on a VM Extension for Linux and would love to hear any feedback you might have.

We are eager to hear from you about your use cases and how we can evolve the VM Extension to help you. So please reach out to us and add your feature requests to the Azure feedback forum. If you run into issues using the VM extension please reach out to us on StackOverflow.

Prashanth Yerramilli, Senior Program Manager, Azure Key Vault

Prashanth Yerramilli is the Key Vault Program Manager on the Azure Security team. He has over 10 years of Software Engineering experience and brings to the team love for creating the ultimate development experience.

Prashanth can be reached at:
-Twitter @yvprashanth1
-GitHub https://github.com/yvprashanth

If you’re one of the many who’ve been eying iOS users with envy as they’ve been enjoying Farming Simulator/RPG Stardew Valley, you need not worry anymore – we now have a concrete release date for the game’s Android release.

Comes March 14^th, 2019 Android users will be able to get stuck in as they try to rebuild their grandfather’s farm in a village in the middle of nowhere. Probably Wales.

The Android version will cost the same as the iOS version ($7.99 / $7.99 / €8,99), and you can head on over to the Google Play store to pre-register right now. It will also come with the following improvements that the mobile version has enjoyed since launching on iOS:

• Save at any time – even when you close the app!
• Pinch-zoom functionality, allowing players to handily zoom in to track down your Junimos or zoom out to get a full view of your farm.
• New control systems including virtual joystick and invisible joystick options, ‘action / attack’ button option, improved auto-attack and Joypad adjuster tool with complete customization of your onscreen controls.
• Additional supported languages – Korean, Italian, French and Turkish (these will be patched into the iOS version of the game at a later date).

While ConcernedApe made the PC & Console version, the mobile version was developed by The Secret Police.

Finishing in hard cover form just in time for GTC 2019, NVidia and APress have team up to author Ray Tracing Gems, a book on real-time raytraced graphics development in the popular “Gems” format.  Even better, they are making digital chapters available as they are developed, free to those with a NVidia developer account (which is also free).  The chapters are distributed under the Creative Commons 4.0 International License and are available for download here.  Unfortunately Part 5 is currently missing and parts 6 and 7 are slated to be published later this week.

Here is the current table of contents from the RealTimeRendering homepage:

PART 1: RAY TRACING BASICS, editor: Chris Wyman

• 1. Ray Tracing Terminology, by Eric Haines and Peter Shirley
• 2. What is a Ray? by Peter Shirley, Ingo Wald, Tomas Akenine-Möller, and Eric Haines
• 3. Introduction to DirectX Raytracing, by Chris Wyman and Adam Marrs
• 4. A Planetarium Dome Master Camera, by John E. Stone
• 5. Computing Minima and Maxima of Subarrays, by Ingo Wald

PART 2: INTERSECTIONS AND EFFICIENCY, editor: Ingo Wald

• 6. A Fast and Robust Method for Avoiding Self-Intersection, by Carsten Wächter and Nikolaus Binder
• 7. Precision Improvements for Ray/Sphere Intersection, by Eric Haines, Johannes Günther, and Tomas Akenine-Möller
• 8. Cool Patches: A Geometric Approach to Ray/Bilinear Patch Intersections, by Alexander Reshetov
• 9. Multi-Hit Ray Tracing in DXR, by Christiaan Gribble
• 10. A Simple Load-Balancing Scheme with High Scaling Efficiency, by Dietger van Antwerpen, Daniel Seibert, and Alexander Keller

PART 3: REFLECTIONS, REFRACTIONS, AND SHADOWS, editor: Peter Shirley

• 11. Automatic Handling of Materials in Nested Volumes, by Carsten Wächter and Matthias Raab
• 12. A Microfacet-Based Shadowing Function to Solve the Bump Terminator Problem, by Alejandro Conty Estevez, Pascal Lecocq, and Clifford Stein
• 13. Ray Traced Shadows: Maintaining Real-Time Frame Rates, by Jakub Boksansky, Michael Wimmer, and Jiri Bittner
• 14. Ray-Guided Volumetric Water Caustics in Single Scattering Media with DXR, by Holger Gruen

PART 4: SAMPLING, editor: Alexander Keller

• 15. On the Importance of Sampling, by Matt Pharr
• 16. Sample Transformations Zoo, by Peter Shirley, Samuli Laine, David Hart, Matt Pharr, Petrik Clarberg, Eric Haines, Matthias Raab, and David Cline
• 17. Ignoring the Inconvenient When Tracing Rays, by Matt Pharr
• 18. Importance Sampling of Many Lights on the GPU, by Pierre Moreau and Petrik Clarberg

PART 5: DENOISING AND FILTERING, editor: Jacob Munkberg

• 19. Cinematic Rendering in UE4 with Real-Time Ray Tracing and Denoising, by Edward Liu, Ignacio Llamas, Juan Cañada, and Patrick Kelly
• 20. Texture Level of Detail Strategies for Real-Time Ray Tracing, by Tomas Akenine-Möller, Jim Nilsson, Magnus Andersson, Colin Barré-Brisebois, Robert Toth, and Tero Karras
• 21. Simple Environment Map Filtering Using Ray Cones and Ray Differentials, by Tomas Akenine-Möller and Jim Nilsson
• 22. Improving Temporal Antialiasing with Adaptive Ray Tracing, by Adam Marrs, Josef Spjut, Holger Gruen, Rahul Sathe, and Morgan McGuire

PART 6: HYBRID APPROACHES AND SYSTEMS, editor: Morgan McGuire

• 23. Interactive Light Map and Irradiance Volume Preview in Frostbite, by Diede Apers, Petter Edblom, Charles de Rousiers, and Sébastien Hillaire
• 24. Real-Time Global Illumination with Photon Mapping, by Niklas Smal and Maksim Aizenshtein
• 25. Hybrid Rendering for Real-Time Ray Tracing, by Colin Barré-Brisebois, Henrik Halén, Graham Wihlidal, Andrew Lauritzen, Jasper Bekkers, Tomasz Stachowiak, and Johan Andersson
• 26. Deferred Hybrid Path Tracing, by Thomas Schander, Clemens Musterle, and Stephan Bergmann
• 27. Interactive Ray Tracing Techniques for High-Fidelity Scientific Visualization, by John E. Stone

PART 7: GLOBAL ILLUMINATION, editor: Matt Pharr

• 28. Ray Tracing Inhomogeneous Volumes, by Matthias Raab
• 29. Efficient Particle Volume Splatting in a Ray Tracer, by Aaron Knoll, R. Keith Morley, Ingo Wald, Nick Leaf, and Peter Messmer
• 30. Caustics Using Screen Space Photon Mapping, by Hyuk Kim
• 31. Variance Reduction via Footprint Estimation in the Presence of Path Reuse, by Johannes Jendersie
• 32. Accurate Real-Time Specular Reflections with Radiance Caching, by Antti Hirvonen, Atte Seppälä, Maksim Aizenshtein, and Niklas Smal

Once compiled the electronic version of the book will remain freely downloadable, although in what formats has yet to be determined.

GameDev News Book

© 2019 Valve Corporation. All rights reserved. All trademarks are property of their respective owners in the US and other countries.

Added some previously unavailable heroes to Ability Draft
* Beastmaster (Hawk is not draftable)
* Lone Druid
* Io
* Monkey King (Primal Spring is not draftable)
* Shadowfiend (Shadowraze Medium and Presence of the Darklord are not draftable)
* Techies (Minefield Sign is not draftable)
* Meepo (Divided We Stand is not draftable)
* Rubick (Spellsteal is not draftable)
Will-o-wisp and Tag Team are now draftable in Ability Draft

Starting at 2:00 p.m. PST today, members of the Xbox One Preview Beta Ring will begin receiving the latest 1904 Xbox One system update (19h1_release_xbox_dev_1904.190221-2147). Read on for more about the new features, fixes and known issues in the latest 1904 system update.

New Features:

A complete feature list for 1904 is published here https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2019/02/21/new-features-rolling-out-to-xbox-insiders-this-spring/

This build contains the new Storage uninstall feature to please test.

Improved uninstall

When you try to install a new game or app today with a full HDD we send you to your collection to choose what to remove. The new suggested uninstall feature will instead send you to a page that has titles suggested for removal that will free up enough space for your install and to make things even easier it will auto-kickoff the install once the space is freed up!

You can also get to the new drive manager page via Settings > System > Storage (then select the storage device and Uninstall items) to easily manage your existing content and uninstall multiple titles at once.

Fixes:

My Games and Apps

• We have resolved a system memory leak that will address the following issues with games and apps:
  
  • Apps such as Netflix unable to launch or crashing on launch.
  • Various games simply fail to launch with a generic error message after playing a 4k title for a period of time.
  • If playing a 4k title and taking a series of screenshots or game DVR clips you would find the system slow or lock up.

System

• We have resolved a system memory leak that will address the following issue on home:
  
  • When playing a game and returning to the guide you would see corrupt text or missing graphics on home.

• The system clock is now displaying on home for various locales.
• Localization fixes.

Known Issues:

Achievements

• Achievements list not being displayed while in a game.

Audio

• We are aware of issues of No Audio heard from Non-Spatial Audio games when using Dolby Atmos for Home Theater with the LG SJ9 soundbar.

 Disney Adventures

• We are tracking an issue that this title is crashing on launch.

 Game Pass Mobile App

• Issue/Impact – After pushing a remote installation of a game from the Game Pass mobile app, customers will not see progress of the installation on in the mobile app and may not receive install notifications.  The game will still successfully install if there is sufficient available space on the console.
• Affected audience – must be in 1904 preview, must be a GP subscriber, must be using the GP mobile app, must be pushing game installations from the app.
• Workarounds – None.  A fix is coming in the next version of the mobile app in March.  Customers interested in getting early access to the fix can download the Game Pass Beta app.

Messaging

• We are tracking that some users are report unable to send/receive messages with latest update.

Profile Color

• Sometimes users may encounter the incorrect Profile color when powering on the console.

System

• We are tracking an issue in which the Console locks up when accessing guide after playing a title or app.

Japan often plays hosts to incredible Legend of Zelda concerts featuring fully orchestrated performances of beautiful pieces from the series’ history. Naturally, it’d be pretty expensive to fly over there and experience one first hand, but this new CD and blu-ray release might just do the trick.

Available with international shipping via Amazon Japan, this release comes in two variants. You can either grab a CD featuring a full soundtrack recording from the 2018 concert, or a fancy limited edition which also comes with a blu-ray of the performance and other goodies shown in the image below.

The standalone CD costs ￥3,240 before shipping (approx. £22 / $29), whereas the limited edition costs ￥4,972 (approx. £34 / $44.50).

You can get a sense of the audiovisual delights contained in the release with this video below. That Breath of the Wild intro… *shivers*.

Thinking of picking one up? Let us know which edition you might get in the comments.

Today’s Deal: Save up to 90% on select titles during the GameChanger Charity Event!*

Look for the deals each day on the front page of Steam. Or follow us on twitter or Facebook for instant notifications wherever you are!

*Offer ends Friday at 10AM Pacific Time

It’s that time of year again… You know the one, it happens every year in December and brings a tear to everybody’s eye… That’s right, it’s the last major snapshot of the year! Todays snapshot brings us a lot of cool Village related features, and we’re happy to finally get these out to you all before the year’s up. We weren’t able to finish everything we wanted, however, so we’ll see you again soon in January with even more Village & Pillage features to help test! Have a great new year, everybody!

A full summary of the content available in this snapshot can be found in the changelog on Minecraft.net, the following is a short summary:

• Added Barrel functionality
• Added Blast Furnace functionality
• Added Smoker functionality
• Added Bell sound
• Added Jellie
• New villages
• Updated Villager
• Changes to raids
• Updated some textures
• Fixed bugs

BARREL

• Acts as a storage unit for all your things
• Works in tight spaces

BLAST FURNACE

• New furnace upgrade that allows for the smelting of ores and melting of metals faster than the traditional Furnace.
• Can be crafted via 3 Smooth Stone, 1 Furnace, and 5 Iron Ingots.

SMOKER

• New furnace upgrade that allows for the smelting of foods faster than the traditional Furnace.
• Can be crafted via 4 Logs, and 1 Furnace.

VILLAGES

• Added Taiga villages
• Updated Desert villages

VILLAGERS

• Villagers and Zombie Villagers now have new fancy skins
• Added Mason profession (trades will come later)
• Cured Zombie Villagers retain their trades

RAID CHANGES

• Patrol captains now give 1-3 bad omen levels when killed. Outpost captains always give 1 only
• Captains now spawn at outposts
• Beasts start at wave 2, witches at wave 4, evoker wave 10

To get snapshots, open your launcher and go to the “launch options” tab. Check the box saying “Enable snapshots” and save. To switch between the snapshot and normal version, you can find a new dropdown menu next to the “Play” button. Back up your world first or run the game on in a different folder (In the “launch options” page).

Please report any and all bugs you find in Minecraft to bugs.mojang.com.

Snapshots can corrupt your world, please backup and/or run them in a different folder from your main worlds. 

Share your thoughts on how 1.14 is shaping up in the comments below!