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It was my understanding that the BIOS password was just one of many security layers that would ideally be in place in a protected environment, said layers being
by 0xEF 3y ago
It was my understanding that the BIOS password was just one of many security layers that would ideally be in place in a protected environment, said layers being pretty effective when working in concert.
My gripe is the eBay sellers and liquidators who want to sell a BIOS-locked laptop at full price. If a seller can't handle removing/resetting this password, then they shouldn't be selling it, or at the very least, list it as a $5 parts machine.
- mjg59 3y agoThe BIOS password is a pretty meaningful protection - if it can be easily subverted it's possible to disable security features (such as IOMMU configuration for Thunderbolt devices in the boot environment) that allow an attacker to compromise the boot process. But I agree that there's no universe in which people should be selling devices that require unknown passwords as if they're generically usable.
- gizmo686 3y agoWe are talking about having physical access to the machine for long enough to partially dissasemble it and physically manipulate the mother board. There are a lot of attacks that enables, and almost no one even claims to defend against them. Put another way, a modern computer can be thought if as a network of relativity simple devices, of which the eeprom is one. Normally we assume that an attacker does not have access to this network. If the attacker does have access to this network, the game is lost. Everything about the network is unencrypted.
- 0ct4via 3y agoThis.