Security Industry Incapable of Finding Firmware Attackers

Posted by Unknown on Wednesday March 19, 2014 @04:37AM from the just-use-coreboot dept.

New submitter BIOS4breakfast writes "Research presented at CanSecWest has shown that despite the fact that we know that firmware attackers, in the form of the NSA, definitely exist, there is still a wide gap between the attackers' ability to infect firmware, and the industry's ability to detect their presence. The researchers from MITRE and Intel showed attacks on UEFI SecureBoot, the BIOS itself, and BIOS forensics software. Although they also released detection systems for supporting more research and for trustworthy BIOS capture, the real question is: when is this going to stop being the domain of research and when are security companies going to get serious about protecting against attacks at this level?"

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Re:Least interest by Anonymous Coward · 2014-03-19 04:48 · Score: 4, Informative

Nice try, but it runs in ring 0, so it can jump into the kernel anywhere it wants.
Attacks on UEFI... by Obfuscant · 2014-03-19 05:00 · Score: 3, Informative

Would that include "attacks" that allow OSs other than the officially state-approved and certificate-signed ones to be booted. Like that hacker-prone and highly illegal "Linux" thing I've been hearing about? I'm glad that researchers are protecting us against such flim-flammery and obviously dangerous stuff.