4 ms·
Thunderbolt is a back door. Generally, physical access to any machine and "all bets are off", but still, I'd rather not have an orifice on my machine that says
by AsymetricCom 13y ago
Thunderbolt is a back door. Generally, physical access to any machine and "all bets are off", but still, I'd rather not have an orifice on my machine that says "fuck me here please" no matter what my business. USB can be implemented in ways that are more secure, but they are often not.
- kabdib 13y agoYeah, I won't have an enabled 1394 connector on my PCs; USB is highly filtered and won't give you the bus-level keys to the kingdom. That said, USB is a huge pain in the rear to deal with, especially isochronous traffic.
- aa0 13y agoThunderbum?
- cnvogel 13y agoIn principle this could be mitigated with a suitably programmed IOMMU which can limit the operations that a DMA capable device (e.g. on the other side of the Thunderbolt connector) can do with your main memory. Traditionally they are used when you have an operating system running in a virtual machine, but you want (for whatever reason) give it hardware access to a PCI card. Without the IOMMU, the virtual machine could program, e.g. a network card to read/write to memory that belongs to the host operating systems, hence breaking free of the virtualization jail. But, as far as I know, it was also possible to limit DMA in firewire controllers. Was that implemented in practice? I don't know. So will it be done for Thunderbolt-Enabled computers?