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Researchers Create Mac "Firmworm" That Spreads Via Thunderbolt Ethernet Adapters
BIOS4breakfast writes: Wired reports that later this week at BlackHat and Defcon, Trammell Hudson will show the Thunderstrike 2 update to his Thunderstrike attack on Mac firmware (previously covered on Slashdot). Trammell teamed up with Xeno Kovah and Corey Kallenberg from LegbaCore, who have previously shown numerous exploits for PC firmware. They found multiple vulnerabilities that were already publicly disclosed were still present in Mac firmware. This allows a remote attacker to break into the Mac over the network, and infect its firmware. The infected firmware can then infect Apple Thunderbolt to Ethernet adapters' PCI Option ROM. And then those adapters can infect the firmware of any Mac they are plugged into — hence creating the self-propagating Thunderstrike 2 "firmworm." Unlike worms like Stuxnet, it never exists on the filesystem, it only ever lives in firmware (which no one ever checks.) A video showing the proof of concept attack is posted on YouTube.
I vaguely remember the day when chips were socketed, exactly for that inevitability. Updates are more expensive that way, but it all depends on how secure you want to be. Remote updates will never, ever be secure. It is nothing but a perpetual cat and mouse game.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I like the flash chip with a hardware switch/jumper to enable writing to it. You've got the hardware read only protection but you can update it without replacing anything socketed.
Correct...except I think it needs to be clarified that the jumper or switch is actually a physical cutoff that would prevent flashing. You need to make this distinction, because I'm pretty sure I've seen hardware jumpers that just toggle a bit in the bios/firmware config, thus telling the bios whether or not to allow it, and if the bios/firmware is hacked, the physical jumper is not actually a physical obstacle.