Researchers crack open malware that hid for 5 years

Post by kjs3 » Mon, Aug 15, 2016, 10:03 PM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #177

infinite8s wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you can't do over the wire updates, which means no fixes after it's been manufactured and installed, which would probably increase the costs quite a bit.

> Then you can't do over the wire updates, Which, of course, is the whole point. If ROMs do cost more, I bet people who want secure systems would be quite willing to pay a bit extra. It would be too expensive to put an OS in ROM, but the ROMs could contain the hashes of the OS on disk, and can verify the disk image before booting. And besides, why would I want over-the-air updates to my freakin' thermostat?

There are some pretty dense, cheap ROMs out there, certainly 64Mb and I think 128Mb. Nothing as dense as flash, tho. Of course, you can just disable writing of flash memory and get the same result.

Post by heavenlyhash » Wed, Aug 17, 2016, 7:23 PM UTC

infinite8s wrote: post #222

WalterBright wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can update the firmware over a network, you have an uncloseable exploit vector. ROMs are not unfixable. They do require physical access, though, which eliminates nearly all of the risk.

Even if those updates require signature verification with a public key stored in ROM? I guess the signing key cold get out or you could patch the firmware to skip the signature check (the way the initial iPhone was jailbroken)

We also literally just had the Windows key leaks within the last week. Un-updatable signing keys are still an uncloseable exploit vector. (And updatable signing keys are an uncloseable exploit vector. You can't win.)

Physical-access-only updates: yes please. We know what the security boundary is on those, and how to reset it.

Re: Researchers crack open malware that hid for 5 years

Re: Researchers crack open malware that hid for 5 years