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Comment by sp332 | Hacker News Reader

I think the headline should be, "FireWire is insecure and can be used to dump the contents of your RAM." But that's always been true, regardless of OS.

Edit: the WinLockPwn tool has been available since 2008, you can just plug one computer into another and dump the RAM. You can then use "signatures" to search for passwords for various systems, including Windows. http://web.archive.org/web/20090402130220/http://storm.net.n...

I like this part:

I'm also pleased to note... the guy who did it by plugging a Cardbus Firewire card into a laptop that didn't have firewire, waiting for it to auto install it (while at the locked screen!) then winlockpwning it. That's awesome. :)

So, even if your laptop doesn't currently have firewire, you're still not safe.

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A Debian Developer has a good set of articles[1] on this vulnerability. It's really a pretty astonishing aspect of FireWire.

Time to whip out the epoxy, I reckon.

[1]: http://www.hermann-uwe.de/blog/physical-memory-attacks-via-f...

> It's really a pretty astonishing aspect of FireWire.

Not really. Note that LightPeak/Thunderbolt has the exact same issue. I believe it can be mitigated by the right IOMMU implementation (if the OS takes advantage of the feature).

I think this is a much better article to read, because it covers a variety of platforms, instead of grabbing headlines by talking about Lion, and it contains links to a variety of preexisting papers and tools, instead of regurgitating the contents of a press release

Here is another interesting method dubbed KonBoot.

Kon-Boot is an prototype piece of software which allows to change contents of a linux kernel (and now Windows kernel also!!!) on the fly (while booting). In the current compilation state it allows to log into a linux system as 'root' user without typing the correct password or to elevate privileges from current user to root. For Windows systems it allows to enter any password protected profile without any knowledge of the password. It was acctually started as silly project of mine, which was born from my never-ending memory problems :) Secondly it was mainly created for Ubuntu, later i have made few add-ons to cover some other linux distributions. Finally, please consider this is my first linux project so far :) Entire Kon-Boot was written in pure x86 assembly, using old grandpa-geezer TASM 4.0.

http://www.piotrbania.com/all/kon-boot/

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