Hacker News Reader

Could this attack compromisse dedicated/rent servers? If so, the attacker could rent, install the exploit on the hardware and terminate the contract. What about cloud servers? Sure there are virtualization layers, but can't those be breached? If so that would pose imense danger given the distributed nature the hardware exploit could render the entire farm vulnerable

View on HN

The attack could compromise other servers yes. I think the scenario you describe is a possibility, although there are some technical feats that would make wide-scale exploitation difficult - you need to know what you want to modify ahead of time which would be difficult.

Virtualised environments that don't pass the vendor specific commands should be immune to the attack though. As others have said, encryption would probably allow tampered pages to be detected. I'd be interested to see if the modified firmware could ignore new firmware...

> encryption would probably allow tampered pages to be detected

Careful!

It can, but doesn't always. For example, eCryptfs currently doesn't protect against tampering; it uses Cipher Block Chaining (CBC) mode without a HMAC or other signature.

(I'm working with some colleagues to add Galois/Counter Mode (GCM) support to eCryptfs, which does provide some form of tamper-detection.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com