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Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

"All BIOS settings were locked with a password"

This is trivial to override for every laptop I've ever had, with sites like https://bios-pw.org/ You have to read carefully, like doing "<ctrl><enter>" and not just "<enter>", but it's worked many times for me.

Source code is here: https://github.com/bacher09/pwgen-for-bios

I do see that Lenovo (brand of laptop in the article) isn't on their list, though many others are.

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Most enterprise machines (Lenovo Think, HP Pro/Elite and Dell OptiPlex/Vostro) will have a hardened BIOS that you can't reset unless you have proof of purchase of the machine.

I've used it specifically on 2 of those. No issues.

For HP this is not true. In college I rescued 2 HP EliteBooks from the e-waste bin and both had locked BIOSes. It was as simple as buying a cheap SPI programmer (I got a CH341A-based one) and dumping the BIOS chip, then unlocking the dump with a tool called HPUnlocker, and reflashing it. Didn't even need to solder because the programmer came with a chip clip. These were EliteBook 840 G2s, but modern EliteBooks are still vulnerable to this.

At least for Lenovo/IBM, that's what they want you to think; but anyone with knowledge of the third-party repair industry knows that isn't true at all:

http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/maintenance#Recovering_BIOS_pa....

That is very old information and not up to date (newest laptop in that list is 14 years old). Resetting a BIOS password for newer models requires a bit of voodoo (booting up with what looks like a debug BIOS to retrieve info from somewhere else in the system).

Interesting. I've always assumed that resetting BIOS settings, including the password, is as easy as removing the battery regardless of how modern the machine is.

This is not the case for Macs.

I believe it's still that way for low-end machines. For higher end ones, there's some range of security-by-obscurity to actually secure. And a bunch of tools to circumvent, ranging from open source (like the one I referenced), hardware assisted, to pay-per-unlock services.

Some high end machines also have specific solder points you can ground out during boot, but it's not shorting a battery, it's setting a GPIO state.

A lot of newer ones store the password and settings in EEPROM instead of NVRAM/CMOS.

Many newer models of laptops, especially those being deployed in the enterprise have the ability to reset the BIOS locked out as well, to prevent explicitly the attacks suggested in the OP.

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