Full Disclosure mailing list archives
RE: Bios programming...
From: "Matt Marooney" <matt () dynamicanswers com>
Date: Thu, 3 Mar 2005 16:20:03 -0500
Hmm... That's all true... Especially the motivated user part :) I'm banking on the probability that most people don't even know what a BIOS is. If they go to a site, and sign up for the service, after entering their info, and email recipients, they would be prompted to continue and download a small piece of software onto their computer. The user would be assured that the software would not interfere with their normal computer use (and it won't) and that's that. They would have no idea how the program is working, or where the program resides. This ignorance, should, IMHO, keep MOST people from figuring out how to remove it (except you and me and everyone else on this list ;)) I want to exploit the fact that they don't know which protocols are being monitored, so they will be afraid to try to get around it. Psychologically, the unknown will be more of a deterrent than anything else. I know that I have had a bear of a time removing spyware in the past, maybe we can leverage that technology for good somehow. -----Original Message----- From: Valdis.Kletnieks () vt edu [mailto:Valdis.Kletnieks () vt edu] Sent: Thursday, March 03, 2005 3:57 PM To: Matt Marooney Cc: full-disclosure () lists netsys com Subject: Re: [Full-disclosure] Bios programming... On Thu, 03 Mar 2005 15:33:09 EST, Matt Marooney said:
The intent of the BIOS portion of the program was just to have a small
bit of code that checked for the existence of the main monitoring program on the disk, and if it was not there, reload it somehow. The main program would run from the disk, not the BIOS.
Like I said - all it takes is a Knoppix disk to screw over most of these schemes - you can't even disable booting from CD and put a BIOS password on, because you have the following: 1) A motivated user 2) Unmonitored, unobserved physical access (if you don't, there's *bigger* problems in this scenario ;) 3) Somewhere in there, there's a jumper that will reset the BIOS password.... There's really *NO* way to do this on today's commodity hardware in a way that will stop a user who knows it's there and has physical access. At best, you can do it in a way that will surprise an *unsuspecting* person (which is what most of these anti-theft beacon programs do - the only reason they work is because the guy who jacked the laptop probably doesn't realize the program is installed, and thus doesn't take precautions to stop it). The only way you can make this work is if you have hardware that includes something like the TPM chipsets from NatSemi or Atmel. Unfortunately, if your operating system contains enough support for the chipset to use it so the person at the keyboard can't subvert it, it will almost certainly use it *itself* to stop people from doing exactly the sort of code insertion you're trying to do. So you're *still* screwed. :) _______________________________________________ Full-Disclosure - We believe in it. Charter: http://lists.netsys.com/full-disclosure-charter.html
Current thread:
- RE: Bios programming..., (continued)
- RE: Bios programming... Matt Marooney (Mar 03)
- Re: Bios programming... Ankush Kapoor (Mar 03)
- RE: Bios programming... Randall Perry (Mar 03)
- RE: Bios programming... Matt Marooney (Mar 03)
- Re: Bios programming... Bill Humphries (Mar 03)
- Re: Bios programming... dk (Mar 04)
- Re: Bios programming... Steve Kudlak (Mar 03)
- RE: Bios programming... Matt Marooney (Mar 03)
- Re: Bios programming... dk (Mar 04)
- Re: Bios programming... Paul Schmehl (Mar 04)
- Re: Bios programming... Valdis . Kletnieks (Mar 03)
- RE: Bios programming... Matt Marooney (Mar 03)
- Re: Bios programming... Steve Kudlak (Mar 03)
- RE: Bios programming... Aditya Deshmukh (Mar 03)
- Re: Bios programming... Steve Kudlak (Mar 04)
- Re: Bios programming... Pedro Venda (Mar 04)
- Re: Bios programming... Michael Holstein (Mar 03)