Re: Flames over -- Re: Which is simpler? (Was Re: [Suspend2-devel] Re: [ 00/10] [Suspend2] Modules support.)

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On Feb 12, 2006, at 11:56, [email protected] wrote:
On Sun, 12 Feb 2006 11:32:44 EST, Kyle Moffett said:
and X when sleeping? Don't you *dare* say "somebody could attach a hardware debugger and read your data out of RAM", because I just don't see that happening in any reasonable situation, there are too many obstacles to doing that with a _laptop_, the first of which is just that it's impossible to take the damn thing apart when it's on without disconnecting massive amounts of critical wiring.

No need to take anything apart if that laptop has a FireWire port on the outside. See Quinn's Firestarter that won best hack at MacHack 2002.

http://www.quinn.echidna.id.au/Quinn/WWW/Hacks.html#FireStarter

No need to crack the case at all. And it isn't a Mac-only issue - it's the way FireWire works.

/me reads spec. *sigh* Whatever idiocy-committee wrote that spec was clearly either smoking crack or living in a fantasy-world (or both). An arbitrary unrestricted DMA bus is a massive and painfully obvious security hole. Can somebody _please_ shoot the guy that came up with that brilliant idea? At least it looks like it's not available if the firewire modules aren't loaded, which means that you can prevent that sort of attack, and my laptop luckily doesn't load those modules at boot just to save a bit of memory. Even still, that's just a terrible idea. Is there any practical way to restrict DMA and make FireWire secure?

Cheers,
Kyle Moffett

--
I didn't say it would work as a defense, just that they can spin that out for years in court if it came to it.
  -- Rob Landley



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