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Getting into SMM means you can circumvent flash protection, which means you can rewrite the firmware to backdoor the OS on every boot without needing to leave a
by mjg59 2y ago
Getting into SMM means you can circumvent flash protection, which means you can rewrite the firmware to backdoor the OS on every boot without needing to leave any evidence in the filesystem, which a normal compromise of ring 0 wouldn't. I don't think most people need to worry about this, but if the claims are accurate this is a genuine circumvention of a privilege boundary.
- broknbottle 2y agoNo need to speculate and worry about this sort of thing, PC manufacturers have been doing this for years.. https://www.techdirt.com/2015/08/13/lenovo-busted-stealthily-installing-crapware-via-bios-fresh-windows-installs/ https://www.techdirt.com/2015/08/13/lenovo-busted-stealthily... https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-us/000130396/what-is-absolute https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-us/000130396/what-is-a... https://i.dell.com/sites/content/business/solutions/brochures/en/Documents/absolute-computrace-security.pdf https://i.dell.com/sites/content/business/solutions/brochure...
- ori_b 2y agoYeah. it sounds like SMM was a mistake, and we should have a user-controlled OS at that level (or, nothing at all).