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The information on Groklaw is not intended to constitute legal advice. While Mark is a lawyer and he has asked other lawyers and law students to contribute articles, all of these articles are offered to help educate, not to provide specific legal advice. They are not your lawyers.

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And therein lies the rub | 210 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
And therein lies the rub
Authored by: SpaceLifeForm on Sunday, July 08 2012 @ 05:49 PM EDT
With UEFI (which is basically an OS/VM in itself,
complete with C library and network stack),
you will not be able to distinguish between
'Microsoft and Moles with Government Intelligence
Agencies' and 'Malware writers'.

In theory, because the updates are supposed to be signed,
and therefore 'Malware writers' will be blocked, and
that only 'trusted' entities with the signing keys
will be able to issue updates to the UEFI.

In other words, you are supposed to drink the koolaid
and believe that big brother is trustable, and that you
will never get any backdoor/rootkit loaded into your UEFI.

With UEFI, updates can be delivered to the UEFI bypassing
user control. Based upon what I have seen with Intel UEFI motherboards,
the 'flashing' process actually does nothing
but deliver the 'goods' to the existing UEFI firmware, which
then does a signature check on the 'goods', and if it passes,
the UEFI will update itself.

The core UEFI firmware is locked, and unless you want
to do some soldering and JTAG work, you likely will never
be able to get any modified firmware installed.

Since UEFI is signed, and basically an OS with network access, you have
absolutely no control over if and when
the 'goods' get delivered and installed.

And one of those 'goods' could be to lock you out,
preventing you from booting your free OS.

Another possibility would be to allow you to boot, and
then spy on you by looking into the booted OS environment,
doing some keylogging or maybe causing random crashes so
that the user gets frustrated and goes back to Windows.

And even more draconian possibility would be to kill
the motherboard completely, knocking even Windows users
off of the Internet.







---

You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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