NIST Publishes Draft Guidelines For Server BIOS Protection

hypnosec writes "The U.S.'s National Institute of Standards and Technology has come up with a set of proposed guidelines for security of server BIOSes— the mechanism on which most modern day computers rely during boot up. Recently quite a few instances of malware have been known to persistently infect computer systems, and cannot be removed even on OS re-installs. NIST is proposing a set of measures through which the BIOS can be made more secure and resistant to such firmware manipulating attacks. Mebromi is one such Trojan. NIST published the draft guidelines [PDF] earlier this week and has proposed four different features through which the server BIOSes can be made more secure: authenticated update mechanism; secure local update mechanism (optional); firmware integrity protections; and non-bypassability features."

Comments

Step one?

[girlintraining]

Step one: Kill UEFI with fire.
Step two (optional): Everything else.

I'm perfectly serious -- If you have UEFI, it doesn't matter how secure everything else is, you're screwed, and you're screwed because Microsoft asked the companies making the motherboards to screw you for the sake of adding yet another failed DRM attempt to their next operating system: Windows 8, "Explode On Launchpad Edition".