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Researchers Demo BIOS Attack That Survives Disk Wipes
suraj.sun writes "A pair of Argentinian researchers have found a way to perform a BIOS level malware attack capable of surviving even a hard-disk wipe.
Alfredo Ortega and Anibal Sacco from Core Security Technologies — used the stage at last week's CanSecWest conference to demonstrate methods (PDF) for infecting the BIOS with persistent code that will survive reboots and re-flashing attempts. The technique includes patching the BIOS with a small bit of code that gave them complete control of the machine. The demo ran smoothly on a Windows machine, a PC running OpenBSD and another running VMware Player."
Last I checked, the BIOS lives in a chip, not the HDD. Thus the magic diskless booting. How is this news?
there are 2 kinds of people. those who divide people into 2 kinds, and those who don't.
It's official - we're screwed.
Would this affect only Intel, or is this entirely unrelated to this previous article?
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/03/19/179228
Some people are only alive because it's against the law for me to hunt them down and kill them.
preinstalled, on ASUS boards: it was the BIOS itself. It too survived hard disk wipes, but it didn't survive my sledgehammer.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
"Sacco and Ortega stressed that in order to execute the attacks, you need either root privileges or physical access to the machine in question, which limits the scope."
Hmm, I'd say you are pretty much pwned in that case even before the attacker infecting the BIOS.
U+F8FF
If BIOSes, CPUs, and other low-level software had factory-reset pins that could not be bypassed through patching, we wouldn't have these problems.
If the pin is set during POST, the CPU, BIOS, or whatever would reset itself to factory conditions. The device would be configured so the factory-reset sequence could not be tampered with through software updates alone.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Of course you can infect a BIOS. It has drawbacks, however. One is very limited space. A second one is that BIOSes flash differently on different mainboards. Maybe not too differently, which would be a real problem. Hoperfully, there is not enough space in the average BIOS for self-relication (which would need exploit code and flasher code at least).
The fact that this is possible is mildly entertaining, nothing revolutionary. Would have been possible (and obviously possible) with the first Flash BIOSES around.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
What were the editors thinking of when they wrote "perform unveil"?
If the BIOS were not hackable, replacing the drive and resetting the boot sequence, BIOS password, and other settings would be sufficient to re-own your machine.
Of course, if your BIOS password were changed, you'd be out of luck, but at least you'd know it.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
So, you patch in some code into the BIOS. Would you be overwriting some functionality to accomplish this? If so, by checking said functionality, could you tell if your BIOS has been corrupted? Such as something simple as seeing if some keyboard functionality still exists (CTRL-ALT-something) or a utility program that iterates through BIOS interrupts and sees if the proper return codes and values come back in the registers?
Good thing I have EFI instead.
Wait, you want me to open a PDF from folks who know how to create such a supervirus? Hmm.
Is this a news report or a trailer for a motion picture?
A quick Google shows BIOS malware going back some time, so I don't know what so different from this one...
Need an ISP in South Africa?
So what's the only way to be sure?
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Isn't there some sort of Open Source BIOS initiative out there? I wonder if it too is affected by this exploit.
It would seem that this is a pretty major exploit if it can be pulled off remotely against the different flavors of BIOS. I mean, unlike a thumb drive, you couldn't simply add a little write lock button on the motherboard to lock the bios into read only mode, could you? The BIOS reads a lot of values from the system as it is booting and after the OS is loaded, so I can't see how you could simply lock down the BIOS to prevent unauthorized writes to it.
Sig Follows: "Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." -- Mark Twain
I am looking for when an exploit is installed using electromagnetic induction, not just reading the bits remotely but modifying them.
I can see it now. Everybody's computer will come preinstalled with a Faraday cage.
Looks like instead of whack-a-mole we are playing whack-a-hole.
I regret that I only have one mod point to give per post.
Since the BIOS information is stored in Flash memory and not the hard drive, it's rather obvious that a BIOS level attack survives a hard disk wipe.
Neither article even mentions hard drives, so I'm wondering why the author felt the need to editorialise. I guess it's to be expected with Slashdot.
Well, I don't give a shit about either. What's your take on OpenBIOS?
"The demo ran smoothly on a Windows machine, a PC running OpenBSD and another running VMware Player." If it's an attack on the BIOS, why would it be dependant on the OS
Shouldn't the virtual BIOS be just a file on the host which you can simply set to read-only to disallow writing?
I was with the summary until that last part... A windows machine, I can accept that. An OpenBSD machine, I can accept that too. But another machine running VMware Player? Thats not an OS, so I don't even know what they were trying to say.
Overclockers
I've found Intel's EFI strategy to be annoying and fragmented. The EFI shell is very dos like, has very poor performance for the frame-buffer devices and leaves a lot to be desired. However, it is likely to become de facto.
I did enjoy most the ALPHA systems SRM. Alpha-SRM had quite a bit of features for a "BIOS" of sorts.
The Sun and Apple OpenFirmware (OpenBoot) systems was probably the closest the world got to a sane pre-boot environment. Openfirmware also has the distinction of being an actual standard IEEE 1275-1994. Unfortunately, they (Sun, Apple mainly) did not help the "linux guys" or the open community until it was too late and protected nearly worthless intellectual property for no good reason. (worthless in the sense its not monetize-able) .
Now I found from long ago the concept of PC BIOS annoying. The BIOS vendors, like Phoenix, American Magatrends, Award, have a lot of collusions with the motherboard vendors in terms of getting all the secret register-poking needed to get things going. There is a lot of black magic, legacy code and the like, but it works.
It will be very hard for a non-Pheonx-AMI-Intel vendor to come up with a new BIOS for the ages. The LinuxBIOS (coreboot) project, last I checked, and very poor support and no major vendor (e.g. Dell or HP) has looked into it seriously.
The world lost when EFI eclipsed OpenFirmware's chances of spreading. Now we are stuck with a half-assed DOS-like shell, a still-extant BIOS like menu screen that the Intel motherboards provide, and judging from the number of revisions and the release notes on the various Intel EFI boards, we may have been better off with AMI/Phoenix's secret sauce and black magic than this EFI cruft.
In the age of 2TB+ volumes it is probably inevitable that we are going to all be using EFI very soon (along with GPT).
I do not foresee Coreboot or OpenBIOS or OpenFirmware making any real progress in pushing out EFI unless Asus or Lenovo sees the utility in having a real pre-boot environment.
Not only do you need root or physical access, you also need the victim to be using a particular type of BIOS. While you could abstract this up to a module, so that it nailed all Phoenix BIOSes, or all Award BIOSes, you'd still need semi-specific payloads for each BIOS OEM. Also, you'd need the target to be using a mainstream commercial BIOS, not UEFI, OpenFirmware, or anything similar.
UEFI will be here and widespread very soon (it's in some machines already, and more every day), and the only real power this 'new' malware has is the persistence/difficulty in removal.
Not impressed.
The preceding comment is my own, and in no way construes an opinon of the Emperor of Mankind.
And here I thought that all the virus writers were just wimps using XSS and Word macros to run generic malware. I wondered where the old school BIOS viruses had gone.
Check out my sysadmin blog!
So, on what base should I trust Asus or somebody to give me a 'clean' bios? When I look at some mainboards with strange additional functionality, I wonder when they will start packing adware onto the chip.
Is there a usable open-source bios alternative available? I've heard about something (and forgot the name) but am not sure whether this can replace my current bios now or is intended for some 'future use'.
You mean, like the BIOS-induced "Flash Write Protect" option in virtually every single BIOS ever made in the last ten years or so?
In April 26, 1999, I turned on my computer, and it met me with a black screen. Turned out that my BIOS was flashed because of this virus: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_virus . Had to re-flash the BIOS. Obviously BIOS could have been loaded with something else other than simply erased.
LiFe iS bEAuTiFul
I thought since that really nasty virus that would brick PCs by writing to bios' that every mobo maker put in write protection that, if enabled, would halt the system when something tried to write to the BIOS.
Wouldn't this prevent this kind of attack?
I'm always stunned to read about "researchers" discovering and demonstrating attacks and security flaws that not only have long existed in the wild but that are in fact very commonly found on computers. This particular one hit me years ago and I've since seen it all over the place. Similarly, there's a great hoohah about the supposedly innovative confickers worming around the web. Reading through the reports you wouldn't know the same techniques have been common (with more effort made at cross-platform and hardware-level exploitation) for at least four or five years. I just wonder how often these people look at actual systems to see whether they're compromised, as opposed to assuming they're okay. When I look at people's computers, they're essentially always polluted. The questions are only how bad and by whom.
Let me get this straight:
It pretty much requires physical access and root. If a malicious person gets that sort of access, I'm screwed anyway.
Ok, so I'm not too worried about anyone installing this on my computer without my knowledge.
What I am interested in is the sort of equipment-tracking possibilities this creates. If I could install a tracking rootkit on a laptop which could silently persist and survive disk wipes and ROM flashes, automatically reporting in whenever it gets net access, it would be a huge advantage if the machine were ever stolen. An OS reinstall is likely, because it's a simple way to circumvent the user account password, but this would even protect against a BIOS flash (which is less likely, but still not out of the question).
Eventually, somebody somewhere would hook the laptop up to the web, probably with a completely fresh OS install, and a subpoena on the IP would reveal their location.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Why the heck not? They used to be the standard. But, people found it ANNOYING. So, it's a much touted feature that the modern BIOS can be rewritten by anybody, without direct access to the machine. My first flashable BIOS, you had to make a boot disk with the new BIOS image, and flashing tool. Then you had to turn the PC off and open the case. Then you had to short the "Write BIOS" jumper. Put the jumper from "OFF" to "ON" for 3+ seconds, then move it back onto the "OFF" pegs. This made it so that the BIOS will accept writes on the next reboot only. You cannot leave the jumper on the "ON" pegs or it won't post, thus preventing you from forgetting about it and leaving the BIOS writable.
Anyways, my new board has two BIOS chips. One is read only I think. There's allegedly a jumper I can set to make it bypass the primary BIOS. It's for recovering from an interrupted or bad patch, but I imagine it would work just fine for removing a BIOS virus, too. (I say allegedly because I've never had cause to look for it).
An Open Source BIOS would not be immune to this, at least, depending on how it works. It patches its own code in. Now, that means on an Open Source BIOS, it could work fine, either because the same code is in the same spot, or because the virus looks for the right spot instead of always writing the same address. Or it could completely trash the BIOS. Either way you're screwed! There's also possibility #3 that it would patch over unused blocks and have no effect, or it would be unable to find the right spot to patch, and so do nothing.
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
Fixed.
Yeah, but when I paid for the internet originally I never inteded for you to being going out and looking and KP, snuff and bestial stuff. I mean, talk about throwing stones in a glass house. Fixed for you would be chemical castration.
Controls the everything about the machine...
Every flash upgradeable BIOS needs a monitor program to upgrade the BIOS itself. Typically that monitor program resides in a separate block in flash and is rarely updated (depending on the programmers, of course!). Putting this monitor program in ROM would allow you to solve this and always allow you to update the BIOS.
A picture is worth exactly 1024 words.
I boot without a bios - by toggling in raw machine code from the front panel switches!
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Does anyone use EFI outside of Apple and IA64 based machines?
Microsoft don't support EFI, even tho Vista promised support for it... EFI is really only of benefit to run OSX or possibly Linux.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
You're being watched . . .
A lot of the intel server boards and the newer workstation boards from Intel have an EFI shell and a non-BIOS preboot environment.
- Tsarkon
I know it was you, Alfredo. You broke my heart!
The "backup copy" could be nothing more than a bootstrap loader that re-loads and validates the a fresh copy of the "working" BIOS from a known location, such as a hard drive, USB stick, or network.
Even with large flashes, this "backup BIOS" shouldn't take up much space.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
tl;dr
2 questions 1: removing C-MOS chip doesnt work? 2: Dual motherboards? im just wondering b/c i have #2, and I will resort to #1 if I get infected by a BIOS virus
My fear is that it's possible to get the bios directly from the factory in China pre-loaded with a virus 'back-door'. I doubt the Chinese have any use for MY computer, but I'm pretty sure nearly all the PCs in the US government and military come from China, and I suspect the Chinese may have an interest in them.
Would this attack work with a liveCD with the payload? :\ if so... Couldn't this be potentially dangerous? Since you could easily and stealthy infect alot of computers, granted you'll need physical access to a USB port/CD/DVD drive...
Just put a flash jumper on the motherboard that must be set to be able to flash the BIOS. Seems to completely solve the problem.
The fact that this was allowed to happen is clearly a defect in design, materials, or workmanship.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Your female acquaintances...
FTFY
I guess guys with thin cocks can really spell.
I wouldn't know. That was Firefox's spellcheck.
they develop a method that survives a bout with a chip puller.
lose != loose
i'm still trying to figure out what the creepy japanese girl with the long hair was doing the whole time
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Best. Troll. Ever.
No. You can't. The BIOS is the first thing that is run at cold boot time. If it is already infected then you can attempt to ensure that it remains infected. If it is not infected, your code doesn't exist in the BIOS to "reinfect" it. During a warm boot (aka reboot) the code remains resident so, again, it is already infected, making it impossible to "re-infect". Nice hyperbole though.
And I have a penis, which makes it rather limiting when I visit the Gynecologist.
... Wind^H^H^H^H err... ahhh... no. I listed all the well known ones I guess.
News flash: If one has proximity, anything is possible. If I have unfettered access to a machine then I can ensure that I can continue to have that access. No shit. Write up something worth reading when you can obtain the access sans my permission in the first place, or at least don't try to claim that it is a threat to *BSDs, Linux, OS X, and other secure Operating Systems. I know I'm missing one
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
AMD has contributed to Coreboot support on their boards for about 2 years now. (According to the news posts at least.)
How is it that a troll can post umlauts and I cannot? Tried playing with the site encoding in Firefox to no avail...
Want to hear the voice of GOD? cat
It all depends on the BIOS of the machine, which is not supposed to be able to be accessed while operation of the OS, some of the newer ones might, but early 2000 we saw some machines coming out with BIOS that was not reachable by the OS, only when you booted from disk, that was the only time you could do a firmware upgrade, I blame the community for pushing to have everything "easy"...is it not easier to be able to update the BOIS, from inside the OS... I say no, it is not a task you should be doing so easily anyways, flashing a BIOS is last measure, and updating the BIOS, (especially if you can easily brick a computer) is not something to be done often.
So what's the only way to be sure?
Nuke it from space, it's the only way to be sure.
ä and Ä ö and Ö ü and Ü ß ä ö ç é áéíÓÚ äëüÖÜ àèìÒÙ ãõñÃÕÑ âêîÔÛ ç å Ç Å ß æ ø Æ Ø
æt hine on ylde eft gewunigen
wilgesias, onne wig cume,
leode gelæsten; lofdædum sceal
in mæga gehwære man geeon.
Him ða Scyld gewat to gescæphwile
felahror feran on Frean wære;
hi hyne a ætbæron to brimes faroðe,
swæse gesias, swa he selfa bæd,
endenwordum weold wine Scyldinga---
leof landfruma lange ahte.
ær æt hyðe stod hringedstefna
isig ond utfus, æelingesfær;
aledon a leofne eoden,
beaga bryttan on bearm scipes,
mærne be mæste. ær wæs madma fela
of feorwegum frætwa gelæded;
ne hyrde ic cymlicor ceol gegyrwan
hildewæpnum ond heaðowædum,
billum ond byrnum;him on bearme læg
madma mænigo, a him mid scoldon
on flodes æht feor gewitan.
Nalæs hi hine læssan lacum teodan,
eodgestreonum, on a dydon,
e hine æt frumsceafte forð onsendon
ænne ofer yðe umborwesende.
a gyt hie him asetton segen gyldenne
heah ofer heafod, leton holm beran,
geafon on garsecg; him wæs geomor sefa,
murnende mod. Men ne cunnon
secgan to soðe, selerædende,
hæleð under heofenum, hwa æm hlæste onfeng.
I Ða wæs on burgum Beowulf Scyldinga,
leof leodcyning longe rage
folcum gefræge --- fæder ellor hwearf,
aldor of earde--- , o æt him eft onwoc
heah Healfdene; heold enden lifde
gamol ond guðreouw glæde Scyldingas.
Ðæm feower bearn forðgerimed
in worold wocun, weoroda ræswan,
Heorogar ond Hroðgar ond Halga til,
hyrde ic æt . . . . . . wæs Onelan cwen,
Heaðo-Scilfingas healsgebedda.
a wæs Hroðgare heresped gyfen,
wiges weorðmynd, æt him his winemgas
georne hyrdon, oðð æt seo geogoð geweox,
magodriht micel. Him on mod bearn,
æt healreced hatan wolde,
"capable of surviving even a hard-disk wipe."
The BIOS isn't stored on the hard drive, so why is this surprising?
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Well given that the BIOs is not flash-able to clean the infection, to any person of avg, or less then avg computer skill this will mean that the infected computer with this bogus bios, will be rooted until someone goes in to the bios code and does what the attacker had done, which is to "Patch and compensate the 8 bit check sum" to restore the bios to the un infected state. This will be wonderful for PC companys, as they will sell new pc's to replace infected one's =) . (ALL YOUR BIOS BELONG TO US!)
Well, since you have obviously given this subject a lot of thought, perhaps you can answer a question for me. Why do we NEED a replacement for BIOS anyway? The BIOS we have now works, is pretty simple, and most importantly does its job. Is there some reason why we have to have a replacement? Can't BIOS simply be extending for whatever new tech comes out?
Maybe it is because I'm a "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" kind of guy, or that working PC repair I've seen tons of messed up boxes, but I've seen nothing to indicate that BIOS needs replacing. Hell on a badly messed up PC the BIOS is usually the only thing that IS working. I just don't want to see the BIOS replaced with all this extra functionality we frankly don't need in the preboot(use an instant on Linux for that) that could bring more bugs and instability to systems.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
If it's got Tits or Tires, it's gonna give you problems.
Guess they'll have to add Flashable Chips to that saying....
WTF? Over?
Firecox?
This is the sig that says NI (again)
I'm inclined to agree, but as new things come into play, APIC, ACPI, S1/S3, C-states, flipping NX support and VT support off an on and (list goes on), there is a perceived need to get some of this stuff to interact with a hypervisor rather than a BIOS poking registers and handing off control to something else. For example of a HW-supported hypervisor (& LDOMS) look at the Sun SPARC T5220 type machines, and actual firmware-hypervisor exists there. The ide is tht SW relies on the system firmware or hypervisor to be a true "ring 0", and everything on top is protected from the disparate kernel instantiations on the unit.
I think for consumer boards where you typically see 1 die n cores, the needs for anything more than a simply BIOS-n-go approach is still in its infancy. However, the D975XBX2 (and higher and WRKS boards from Intel) seem to be based off of EFI, and if you read the bugs they fix, they reveal a more than a passive role or a handoff in the BIOS, the EFI has more capability than the BIOS.
One of the biggest things really is to be able to do simple things, like fsck. Alpha SRM could do this, its really useful. Right now we all make a UBCD4WIN or Knoppix disc, but of firmware became more capable, what used to be the BIOS could do cleanups and fixes, and not be such a "dummy."
Again, if I were making boards I'd stick to Phoenix or AMI until I couldn't anymore, simply because they work and not that many people nobody care about hypervisors, VT, fscking volumes in firmware etc, also, its simply who wants to spend the time, AMI/Phoenix and the big guys like Lenovo and Asus get the secret all mixed up perfect. They will continue to leverage legacy code until Microsoft says, "Windows XXX" wont boot off of a BIOS.
Also note that if you read the LKML others like it, broken-BIOS and kernel fixups are at least a weekly discussion, so the ain't broke art of it is "ain't broke for YOU, but if you turn everything on its broken."
"Ä" => "Ä"
and so on.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Rumor says this is exactly how the FBI's Magic Lantern and the german Bundestrojan works (these are government-run secret network communication interception software tools unlawfully used on the people in the name of war on terror).
Hopefully the new info will allow common people to catch in-BIOS samples of the Magic Lantern and give ACLU a field day in the court of law.
Fight the Future! Down with the secret UN World Goverment, its black helicopters and extraterrestrial allies and the wicked Illuminati who run the whole cabal hell-bent on exterminating 4,5 billion out of the world's 6,5 billion human inhabitants!
Welsh?
...that is scheduled for inclusion in Conficker.D
I'm sure a lot of people would love to fire Cox, but I don't see that that has to do with this discussion.
Every single BIOS made in the last ten years? Seriously? Every, single one?
I have 3 popular motherboards that do not have that option listed anywhere in the BIOS screens or the Motherboard Manual.
Asus Rampage X58
DFI Lan Party X38
Biostar GeForce 6100-M9
Sig Follows: "Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." -- Mark Twain
Okay, every *sensible* BIOS in any half-decent board. Seriously, the option is in Award, Pheonix, etc. all the major BIOS's in all the major-name computers I've ever seen. I think I saw a laptop without it once, and once PC that was some bodged-together thing from Japan under a company I'd never heard of.
I don't understand why they don't create a basic bios which can be restored into EPROM by setting a jumper, then you flash a clean up to date version of the BIOS. Short of actual physical access a malware writer could not permanently infect your system.'
And I was wonderning what would be Conficker's next trick...
I boot without a bios - by toggling in raw machine code from the front panel switches!
Well, I boot my computer using only punch cards. And I punch the holes in them myself, from memory! With a twig!!
I think Server 2008 and Vista SP1 support it. It certainly does if you put Server 2008 on an IA64 machine.
Meh I've been dreading the resurgence of this kind of crap for years. The whole modern PC is just a wreck of vulnerable / flaky / malfunctioning [even BEFORE someone else besides the system vendor breaks it] firmware. Motherboard BIOS, hard disk BIOS, GPU BIOS, ethernet BIOS, RAID BIOS, etc.
My system BIOS locks up depending on what USB devices I have attached and what state my KVM switch is in. The system doesn't sleep/wake properly due to BIOS bugs. When the system does wake from sleep, virtual machine extensions are broken due to a BIOS bug. Sometimes it'll lock up for lots of other various "external" and internal configuration based reasons. No fix is forthcoming after years. My network BIOS doesn't network boot reliably / properly. My RAID BIOS hangs the machine if certain drives are attached. My crappy ATI GPU BIOS doesn't run the GPU clock speed or fan speed at proper levels and there is NO solution in the GPU driver, only reflashing the BIOS could help (probably voiding my 'lifetime' warranty), and the OEM doesn't and will not offer a fixed BIOS.
BIOSes are one of the great tragic manure piles of modern PCs. The quicker they're replaced ....
with much more open / accessible / easy to develop code bases the better off we'll be.
It is almost incomprehensible how bad manufactures quality control / customer support is when there's a BIOS that HAS to maybe do a FEW DOZEN essential functions on a fixed hardware platform and they don't even get THOSE FEW THINGS done right, e.g. setting proper voltages / fan speeds / sleep / ACPI / USB / booting /
This (like the legacy PC design we're still using after decades) is just stupid.
The BIOS is something like a whole TWO MEGABYTES. Maybe even FOUR MEGABYTES on some higher end systems with a built in backup. That's like FLOPPY DISC SIZED. WTF are we doing with hard soldered non user replaceable BIOS chips and FLAKY / PAINFUL reflashing systems that FAIL a large percentage of the time and could very well BRICK your PC permanently when the BIOS flash or image does get corrupted?
News flash, Intel, put a freaking *MICRO SD / SD CARD* slot on the motherboard, build the chipset to read that data upon boot, and require something like a 512 MEGABYTE SD card for system BIOS / BIOS backups / whatever system log data you want to keep / low security encryption keys or so on. That'd cost like $1 to implement, it'd be using a STANDARD and CHEAP storage medium that is at a minimum 256 times larger than the current solution, and is TRIVIAL to user replace (socketed, ubiquitous media / readers / writers), and even has a HARDWARE WRITE PROTECT switch available right in the socket. Benefits: cheapish, easy to field replace / upgrade, can store darn near unlimited numbers of backups / alternate versions that are easy to switch between, and even has enough storage capacity to store (if you want to) something like a WHOLE EMBEDDED OS on the "BIOS" SD card sort of like the SplashTop or whatever "instant on" type of utility / maintenance / application environments.
Heck if you're feeling generous put TWO micro SD sockets on the board, one which can be switched by the user to be "read only" for BIOS versions and other "semi permanent" data / embedded OS images / whatever. Make the other "read write" for log data and so on.
If you're feeling even more generous add a USB port for a USB flash drive + integrated TPM type chip so that you can actually [user optionally] portably take your system's encryption / authentication / key type data around with you so that it isn't [necessarily] left at an unattended PC, and so that you can choose instead to use it on a laptop or whatever you need to do to get access to your configurations / stuff.
If you want physical security for this stuff, put it inside the PC case instead of on an external port and physically security lock the case.
Even freaking better, let me boot (bios AND 'OS' code) from my choice of USB drive / SSD / flash card. Boot straight into a bare metal h
Ah, Slashdot understands HTML unicode identifiers. Thanks!
Want to hear the voice of GOD? cat
Slashdot understands some HTML unicode identifiers. , for instance, vanishes without a trace, as does A and the like.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
But that is where my point of "Instant on Linux" comes into play. As you said, for consumers ATM there is no need, but what about in the future? I recently saw an MSI module(sorry i can't find the link, maybe someone here can post it?) that simply plugs into a spare USB pin out on the motherboard and gives you the option of booting straight into it from BIOS.
In this matter we actually have a chance to have our cake and eat it too. Because by using an Instant on Linux not only can you have the functionality of EFI, but you could have different versions. By that I mean for guys like you and me there could be a full implementation of disk and network tools, along with an easy to switch to CLI, and for Joe User you could have a simple XFCE desktop with basic webapps like Firefox. And by going with this method instead of trying to reinvent the wheel with EFI or Openfirmware, you not only allow the user to have choice, but you also allow that functionality to be back ported without replacing the hardware. Simply pick up a module, plug it in, and be good to go. I could even see cases where specifix hardware that needed extra functionality not found in BIOS could simply pack a mini module in with the gear. And with ROM chips getting so tiny it shouldn't be hard to even squeeze this functionality into laptops with little added cost.
But as I said I honestly don't see a need for a replacement for BIOS, not when with Instant on Linux it would be easy to have the BIOS hand off to Linux for the extra functionality. There are plenty of embedded Linux coders out there, so extending it for specific jobs should be easy, and at the same time if the module fails you don't end up with a brick since you can always fall back to BIOS until you get the replacement module. It just seems a lot easier, more profitable, customizable, and less risky to hand it off to Instant on Linux while having the BIOS as the basic starting point.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I am still fascinated by all these Fascist Muslim Zionists running around. Children should stop trying to use words they do not understand. Even copying and pasting from a moron still makes you moron.
Perhpas the bios of this particular AC is infected with a Virus. He has tried to wipe his hard drive several times, but his PC keeps pouring out sensless hate speech.
On an unrelated note, I voted for Bush twice and the deregulating Republican Congress that caused this mess. I accept my responsibility and apologize. It is time you did the same. Trying to blame a mess you clearly helped cause on the people trying to fix it is dishonest and irresponsible.
Moron stay on topic This is a tech area not political I'm guessing that this would not be an issue on an older machine where the BIOS was not writable and hard coded. Ah the days of the program Peanuts where this wouldn't have been an issue
no matter how good it is, it is human nature always wants to make things better
I'm gonna do an Obama in my little panties!
UNGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!
plop! Obama!
I am an IT professional
True, but don't forget what a BIOS does. It doesn't do much after the kernel boots. Simply boot an arbitrary kernel is not a BIOS replacement. Its a feature which seems to amount to booting off of USB.
You need to set hardware registers, you need get the memory timings right, you need to tell every ASIC onboard a lot of information, take out of reset, set the right state. You need to keep CPU microcode up to date. The point is is that before any given kernel loads there has been a massive amount of system-bringup work which wildly varies given the chipsets, system architecture, optional-ROMs, memory timings.
I don't believe that a one-size-fits-all-motherboards BIOS replacement can be made. The first operating code has to do a lot to get things a state where some sort of a pointer to an executable, such as grub or a windows loader, or directly to a kernel.
Every motherboard out there has a lot of magic. If that wasn't the case , then you would go to ftp.us.dell.com/bios and there would only be one file there. There isn't, there is a file for every single system. Even though the systems seem to be on a similar version of the BIOS, any forced cross-flashing will en up with a bricked motherboard.
There are some systems, like the OpenWRT routers like the WRT54G which have a super-easy default state is good enough boot process. But a PC, with the loads of legacy architecture around, is a bit of a pain to bootstrap.
The problem here is the magic, and based on what I've seen in the past , the OpenSource developers on projects like this don't get a lot of help from the chipset and ASIC vendors unless they are an exiting BIOS company or a big buyer like Dell , Intel, etc.
Just to know, magic isn't meant to be a silly term here, there is a lot of stuff you do to certain hardware to make it play in the system correctly that ends up looking like you are just doing random things.
I think that Dell, Asus, Lenovo or HP needs to lead the effort on douching out the crufty old bios. The PC, as arcane as it is, has sat around and watched every single one of its competitors die before its eyes.
How about you go to the Castro, the fucking faggiest part of San Fran, and go up near the Baghdad Cafe, and fulfull your wildest fantasy to chow down on some serious COCK AND BALLS. Hug your inner fag.
On some newer hardware, the hardware includes a component called the Trusted Platform Module (TPM.)
He idea behind this is that it requires cryptographic authentication of the BIOS, which surely would fail after this attack.
The end goal of the TPM is to verify each layer of software: BIOS, operating system, programs.
For reference:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Computing
Of course all the open source weenies here will probably want to run their open source software on open hardware that can be infected. Their choice ;)
Old English. (It looks like an excerpt from Beowulf.)
There was no message, just a drivel filled false rant.
The whole post above is exactly the sort of pathetic lies one expects form the disgruntled racist redneck. But hells bells it is funny. I love wathching these assholes squirm.
So keep up the pathetic dribble, I need a good laugh anyway!
Posting anon as moderating today.
If you had any real strength of conviction you would not post as AC, coward is so appropriate for the likes of you though.
You really are a pathetic asshole you know. Most micro dick trolls like yourself manage at least to be amusing, you fail in every way. Now go back to 4chan or whatever shit filled hole you crawled out of and leave the adults to their conversation.
CAnt wait to finish moderating so I can go back to hiding all of your pathetic drivel. Thats right, most people just dont see this crap, good thing about the moderation system.
Fuck the above is funny in a poor twisted redneck racist way. Browsing at -1 as I am moderating.
I love seeing the sort of pathetic, uneducated rant 'cause it means asshloes like you are angry, and that is a good thing.
Now go back to Digg or 4chan and leave the adults to our adult conversation child.
Thank goodness I only see this crap when moderating and reading at -1. Wouldnt want to die laughing so young.
To have an argument one must be arguing against facts, not made up on the spot drivel from a frustrated, nasty small minded person.
You post is complete crap, an epic fail if I ever saw one!
Oh and if you were a man, you would not post as AC,
the coward part fits you well though.
I've posted my recollection of the presentation which fills in a few of the technical details for some people who missed it - probably missed lots too :)
http://blog.triplecheck.ca/2009/03/few-more-details-regarding-peristent.html
Well fuckety fuck fuck, I've been getting fed all day long. I owned a few threads, and I troll AC to make fucking assholes like you do janitorial work for me and I STILL GET FUCKING BITES. In fact, I get moderated up at times, especially for the Yoda Doll and a few other originals I hold dear to me. Now chew on your own choad you self licking fuckstick
Untitled, inspired by Scooby Doo
"GROOBY ROOBY ROOOOOO!!!" exclaimed Scooby, as his powerful 121/2 inches of angry canine lovestick spewed gallon after gallon of semen over Daphne's naked ass and thighs.
"Oh Scooby, that was amazing, as always,' panted Daphne, as the dregs of her 5th consecutive orgasm died away. "But I do wish you would keep your voice down in the future; you know what my Freddy's like, he gets so jealous - I sure he knows there's something between us.'
Fred and Daphne had been 'going steady' for some time now, Fred believing Daphne to be a virgin; however, Daphne had neglected to mention to him the hot lesbian affair she was conducting with Velma (the way she cried 'Jinkies!' upon climax still rang in Daphne's ears) and the fact that she was here in the back of the Mystery Machine every other night, letting Scooby satisfy his animalistic urges upon her.
But she knew she was a slut, and, goddamn it, she liked it. If it had a pulse, or even if it didn't (as had been the case with numerous supernatural entities in the past), hell, then she was game.
Much as she loved Fred for his sturdy sensibility, his all-American good looks, and his impeccable dress-sense, she found him prudish at times. "Not until we're married, Daph!" he would protest, each time she made her amorous advances towards him. Maybe it was his strict Catholic upbringing. Was it any wonder, she often reasoned, that she had to satisfy her cravings elsewhere? If only Fred could understand, if only he could see the fires that burned within her, within her very being, within her moist and welcoming loins...
Well, in the meantime...
"You ready to go again, Scoob?" she purred, winking seductively, and already back on all-fours.
"UR-HUR-HEE-HEE-HEE-HEE!!!" chuckled Scooby, obviously overjoyed at the prospect.
Just as Scooby was getting ready to deftly plunge his gargantuan helmet into Daphne's juicy crevice, Daphne warned: "Please, Scooby, try to keep it down this time - I don't want Freddy to hear..."
"You don't want Freddy to hear what?"
They both looked round. The doors of the Mystery Machine were torn open, and there, his white sweater glinting in the moonlight, stood Fred, the fire of anger burning fiercely behind his eyes. He surveyed the scene before him - the Great Dane, in an obvious state of extreme arousal, hunched over his precious Daphne's naked ass - and he felt decidedly un-Christian thoughts brewing in his mind.
"You don't want Freddy to hear...what???" Fred repeated, with even more bile.
"Freddy!!! I...I...it's not what it seems...we were just...Scooby! Get off! Bad dog!", Daphne stuttered and protested, trying in vain to pin the blame upon Scooby.
"Oh don't start with that shit, you fucking bitch," spat Fred, his face contorted. "I know what you two have been up to. Every night you come out here, I've been watching you through the Mystery Machine's windscreen. You two make me sick".
"But," he continued, "as I watched more of your trysts, I came to realize that...I like sick."
An evil, mischievous grin spread across his lips.
"And now...it's time for your punishment."
Unable to move, unable to breathe, Daphne and Scooby watched transfixed as Fred produced a number of items he had been concealing behind his back; a coat hanger; a 12-inch, jet-black dildo; a length of barbed wire; an extra large tube of KY Jelly; and a curious, shapeless item that neither of them could make out in the gloom.
"RAAAGGYYY!!!! RELLLLP!!!!" cried Scooby in desperation.
I'm sure a lot of people would love to fire Cox, but I don't see that that has to do with this discussion.
You're talking about Christopher Cox of the Securities and Exchange Commission, right?
As long as this thread is so far off-topic, here's a question for the original poster. If Obama wanted to destroy the U.S. economically, wouldn't the easiest way be to just do nothing about the economy and let it continue to self-destruct?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Coulnd't refute a single point so you degraded into simplistic ad hominem. Man, if you are the start player on that court, this wont be for long. Toodles.
Now I don't have to state the obvious.
However, full disclosure has me admit that I too, did use punched cards. However, I "cheated" and used my privileged access to interactive terminals to compile and debug my code BEFORE I sent it to a card punch for output (since the punched deck of cards was the class requirement. In retrospect, I doubt they spend the money to run the assignments, so it probably didn't matter if they were correct or not. This was back in the day when each print job finished with a "billing" page showing your the not-so-cheap cost to print things).
I pity the poor souls who had to use the public card-punch terminals... it was literally the very last year punched cards were required. heh.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Here's something it WON'T survive... me simply pitching the f@cking computer out the window and going back to working on my old classic cars. Screw it. It's simply just not worth the hassle or the time any more.
My peace of mind does not depend on
Ok, I see. Fix a huge impending default caused by excessive spending by drastically increasing spending! Wow. That is just so smart. I must have missed it the first time around. Co-opt the next generation and the unborn to crushing debt while STILL maintaining over $59T in unfunded debt obligations. You must be partially educated and nearly illiterate because this is all covered in the original factual screed. Yes you can (destroy a republic.)
Flop flop flop in the bottom of the boat.
CONFESSION
Father
A bearded man
A pedophile of sorts
Put his hand
Inside my jocky shorts
I have the right to say "no"
Everyone agrees
But tell me Father
Is it so
That I can't say "Please"?
Some folks felt safe surfing the dark side if they did it inside a virtual machine. They thought "hey, if I get something nasty on my machine, I'll just restore my virtual machine from the checkpoint and voi-la, everything's ok again and I can resume working without a heavy re-install pentalty." But if these crazed Argentinians can infect your machine from an ActiveX control while you're surfing in a virtual machine and you have to reflash your bios to cure the infection, if you can cure it at all, then man, we're all hosed. Bad.
That's not preventing me from cleaning the BIOS by reflashing it. That's infecting the bios from the hard drive to continue an infection.
If you wipe the hard drive, the malware returns through the BIOS. If you flash the BIOS, the malware is rewritten through from the hard drive at boot. That's probably why they're working on a rootkit to hide the hard drive half. Make it a lot harder to eradicate.
However, my standard procedure is to pull a hard drive out of the infected computer first and scan it as a slave. That disables the vast majority of malware protections. If this exploit showed up in the wild, then after detecting it, I would also have to reflash the BIOS (not just wipe user settings with the jumper) before putting the hard drive back into the computer and finishing the cleanup. One more thing to do, but nobody said malware cleanup was supposed to be easy.
One other question I have is what type of machine this thing is infecting? They name three operating systems, but don't mention whether it was different motherboards/BIOSes. If the bad guys have to write hardware-specific code bits for every different manufacturer (and every new BIOS), they're the ones who will be working harder.
Fundamentalism is a crime against humanity
For a point to be refuted you would need to have one, and the facts to back it up.
As you have neither, only paranoid ranting you fail and have lost now go back to 4chan where you belong and leave the adults to rational debate.
Now I found from long ago the concept of PC BIOS annoying. The BIOS vendors, like Phoenix, American Magatrends, Award, have a lot of collusions with the motherboard vendors in terms of getting all the secret register-poking needed to get things going. There is a lot of black magic, legacy code and the like, but it works.
They definitely collude that is very much true. And the reason we need Coreboot ! I do NOT agree with your comment and suggestion of mystery, darkness, black magic as this comes across to me as FUD! Perhaps making it seem hard, difficult or almost impossible so that the average person might be relunctant to improve their lives and move to an open source solution such as Coreboot!
While the Coreboot open source group is publicly stating that it is NOT ready for prime time yet, there are already numerous (read hundreds of...) motherboards and devices supported. So many in fact that you can, today, check their supported list and if the mother board, adapter card or other device is NOT listed as supported, you can avoid allot of hassles. Just buy ONLY Coreboot supported hardware, you will thank me and yourself in the mirror later.
It will be very hard for a non-Pheonx-AMI-Intel vendor to come up with a new BIOS for the ages. The LinuxBIOS (coreboot) project, last I checked, and very poor support and no major vendor (e.g. Dell or HP) has looked into it seriously.
I disagree completely. I would not be surprised to learn that there are developers from some of the major motherboard hardware companies working with the Coreboot group officially or unofficially. This is very common with open source projects that are overcoming the collusion you mentioned above and overcoming the vendor lock-in that ONLY hurts us all and stifles innovation. They can make it harder to innovate, but thanks to open source it is NO LONGER POSSIBLE for anyone to make it impossible. In fact it gets easier and easier every year, every month and every day. Today if you want to avoid proprietary hardware and software you can do it in every vertical market. And today there are so few compromises. The only exception I can think of is one or two Microsoft specific games...hardly surprising there, right.
Additional, if no major vendor is in there fouling up the Coreboot code and group, than I would see that as a HUGE PLUS and not a bad thing at all. It is more likely that some of the coders and engineers have the blessing of their hardware and software company to support Coreboot. These companies are smart and they understand that developing additional markets for their hardware products, especially in this economy, is just plain SMART!
After all I remember reading about a gamer that was frustrated that his fans were not turning off and on correctly, thus his machine was overheating and the operating system shutting down. Through reverse engineering, he discovered that for his operating system (non Microsoft) the fans were not being turned on and off correctly. (Whether this was due to collusion, who knows, it could as easily just been poor testing on the part of the BIOS and hardware motherboard companies who history shows have a pro Microsoft
Is your Internet Throttled? Install DD-Wrt, OpenWRT or Tomato to learn the truth! Google: 1Gbps/1Gbps: 5 Communities
This is a bit off topic, but wouldn't it also be possible to flash one's disk drive or HDD from windows as well, creating even more hardware failure/damage?
They definitely collude that is very much true. And the reason we need Coreboot ! I do NOT agree with your comment and suggestion of mystery, darkness, black magic as this comes across to me as FUD! Perhaps making it seem hard, difficult or almost impossible so that the average person might be relunctant[SIC] to improve their lives and move to an open source solution such as Coreboot!
Liar, I work in the industry and have direct knowledge of the things you need to do to get a system up. Why the HELL would we want average people working on critical boot code? I'd prefer people who actually have domain EXPERTISE.
While the Coreboot open source group is publicly stating that it is NOT ready for prime time yet, there are already numerous (read hundreds of...) motherboards and devices supported. So many in fact that you can, today, check their supported list and if the mother boa. MINDLESS DRIVEL SNIPPED
All the supported boards are more or less outdated and suck. I know the project is not ready for prime time because the project, in addition to spinning its wheels for a half-decade, will not work on anything I care about. All the hardware that is "supported" (and this by no means you will PROMISE to take my phone calls if its broken) is pretty much deprecated shit.
I disagree completely. I would not be surprised to learn that there are developers from some of the major motherboard hardware companies working with the Coreboot group officially or unofficially. This is very common with open source projects that are overcoming the collusion you mentioned above and overcoming the vendor lock-in that ONLY hurts us all and stifles innovation. . MINDLESS DRIVEL SNIPPED.
You would not be surprised? Well, that means you dont know. And they are not. The BIOS vendors are not going to contribute, and nobody else care. And your project will never get anywhere but some old, crusty motherboard that nobody cares about anymore.
Additional, if no major vendor is in there fouling up the Coreboot code and group, than I would see that as a HUGE PLUS and not a bad thing at all. It is more likely that some of the coders and engineers have the blessing of their hardware and software company to support Coreboot. These companies are smart and they understand that developing additional markets for their hardware products, especially in this economy, is just plain SMART!
Its not, you have to reverse engineer everything you don't understand. And you don't understand a lot.
After all I remember reading about a gamer that was frustrated that his fans were not turning off and on correctly, t. MINDLESS DRIVEL SNIPPED
Bullshit. Tom's Hardware and HARD[OCP] don't give a fuck about Coreboot. Nobody does, and nobody who really gives a shit about games plays them on non-Microsoft platforms. Sorry. What a lame and stupid example.
When the BIOS was reversed engineer there were four or more forks for different Microsoft Windows operating system versions MINDLESS DRIVEL SNIPPED
What the hell are you talking about? Are you ESL?
Thanks to Coreboot I can choose form ONLY Coreboot compatible hardware. And avoid these petty issues with proprietary device drivers, BIOS and other solutions. Heck Coreboot is even better to Microsoft than Microsoft will ever be to anyone else as you can use a payload for Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 (beta).
The list is so short and outdates, it probably suits your low-to-no income bracket.
Just another reason why Open Source and FOSS is superior to most proprietary solutions. Proprietary companies should choose INNOVATION as their method of getting and keeping customers rather than vendor lock in. Thanks to Coreboot and Open source I now have a non-proprietary solution for 100% of my personal computer needs, today, right now. Note: I do not play those one or two Microsoft games that ONLY run on Windows. OpenOffice.org does everything and more than Office ever did for me and there are other office open source op