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from the phsyical-access-==-you-lose,-eventually dept.
Thunderspy, as its creator Björn Ruytenberg has named the attack, in most cases requires the attacker to remove the screws from the computer casing. From there, the attacker locates the Thunderbolt chip and connects a clip, which in turn is connected to a series of commodity components—priced about $600—which is connected to an attacker laptop. These devices analyze the current Thunderbolt firmware and then reflash it with a version that's largely the same except that it disables any of the Intel-developed security features that are turned on.
[...] "There are seriously tons and tons of things you can do to a PC once you open the case," says Hector Martin, an independent security researcher with extensive experience in hacking or reverse-engineering the Nintendo Wii, several generations of the Sony PlayStation, and other devices with strong defenses against physical attacks. "The evil maid threat model is interesting when you restrict it to plugging things into ports, because that can be done very quickly when e.g. the target is just looking away."
[...] Readers who are left wondering how big a threat Thunderspy poses should remember that the high bar of this attack makes it highly unlikely it will ever be actively used in real-world settings, except, perhaps, for the highest-value targets coveted by secretive spy agencies. Whichever camp has a better case, nothing will change that reality.
Previously: https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=20/05/11/1721247
(Score: 4, Interesting) by driverless on Friday May 15 2020, @06:38AM
Got offered a bunch of Lenovo X1s from an office where the admin had enabled various security features, including boot passwords, BitLocker, and case tamper protection. After a considerable amount of effort we gave up, they're basically replace-the-motherboard bricks, the only thing we could have salvaged was the SSDs, after wiping them. So some systems are a lot more resistant to this type of attack than others.
Kind of annoying really, those would have been nice laptops to recycle for people who needed them. Not quite as bad as Apple's bricked-by-design non-recyclable laptops, but still pretty hard to do anything with if you don't have the necessary credentials to access them.