TC7 day 2 – Hiding behind antiquity
posted Sep 20th 2005 4:00am by Eliot Phillipsfiled under: Uncategorized
Apparently when Jason Spence isn’t reading Hack-A-Day he is reading manufacturer data sheets. He’s fun in real life; I swear. The talk started with an overview of motherboard architecture. By studying manufacturer data sheets you can figure out a pathway to attack the BIOS. A proof of concept BIOS backdoor has already been developed. This is a very scary situation since the OS isn’t even loaded yet and will be completely blind once it is up. Jason pointed out that smaller manufactures (VIA, SIS) don’t publish data sheets fearing patent infringement. This lack of information makes security a lot harder to pull off. Jason says he’ll be contributing a couple articles in the future.
UPDATE: Jason has posted his uncensored slides.
UPDATE: Slides on the Toorcon site.
crazy l33t shit! woo first post
Posted at 6:49 am on Sep 20th, 2005 by dan