Just hit enter to get a shell of the rooty sort

phoronix.com

13 points·eptcyka··5 comments

If someone is in a position to do this, the chances are they already have physical access, and there are much more worrying things that can be done with that (hardware keyloggers, etc).

The only obvious thing that can be done with this (beyond tampering with firmware) is to backdoor the bootloader/kernel/initramfs/etc, but that can be mitigated with TPM/TXT/tboot (just store your LUKS key in the TPM – any tampering will render it, and therefore your data inaccessible).

I'm rather worried that this isn't getting the upvotes it needs.

I have cryptsetup, so I am probably vulnerable, but I do really care -- I do not have BIOS password, nor do I physically disable my USB ports. If I wanted to get a root shell with the disk still encrypted, it would be much more convenient to just boot from the USB stick.

And in the case of "libraries, ATMs, airport machines" it is likely there will be no boot-time passwords at all -- regular login process will likely be more convenient for many reasons.

Well, if an attacker has the ability to access your computer several times, you only need to screw with your init filesystem once to transfer your password over tcp at boot time, or just safely store it on the disk if you don't get a usable connection at boot time.

yes, but the same could be done by simply booting from USB stick. How does this vulnerability makes it worse? (unless one has BIOS password and strong physical security)

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