What about infected BIOS..

All off topic discussions go here. Everything from the funny thing your cat did to your favorite tv shows. Non-programming computer questions are ok too.
User avatar
Solar
Member
Member
Posts: 7615
Joined: Thu Nov 16, 2006 12:01 pm
Location: Germany
Contact:

Re: What about infected BIOS..

Post by Solar »

To clarify: That paper does not detail how to use radiation of any kind to deterministically penetrate system security measures. All it does is showing how random memory errors of any kind could be exploited theoretically.

There's a world of difference between "hey, look here, I found a way how random memory errors could be exploited" and "this is the X-Bug 5000. Aim it at some computer and get a root login".
Every good solution is obvious once you've found it.
User avatar
Love4Boobies
Member
Member
Posts: 2111
Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 5:36 pm
Location: Bucharest, Romania

Re: What about infected BIOS..

Post by Love4Boobies »

Well, I never claimed that we're at the stage where cosmic radiation can let us remotely control a machine, if that will ever be possible at all. What that paper showed was that given a malicious program running in a virtual machine (that under normal circumstances can't do anything bad) and radiation provided by the attacker, there is a success rate of around 70% for taking over said virtual machine (that's slightly less than random). I think it's pretty impressive.
"Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons.", Popular Mechanics (1949)
[ Project UDI ]
Post Reply