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Comment by delroth | Hacker News Reader

Using any random quad-SPI programmer and soldering it to the chip that contains your BIOS. If dragosr is suspecting a BIOS malware, I can't understand that he hasn't done that yet. From what I've read on his Twitter and Facebook account, he would have spent 3 years investigating this malware and is just now thinking of dumping the ROM of his "infected" USB devices.

Smells fishy to me.

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What if the BIOS code dynamically compresses/decompresses crypts/decrypts code and data?

You then put the code on another machine and you are in the same situation, it seems to me like a vicious circle if you don't know where to cut.

Presumably that's atypical behavior for a BIOS, so an analysis of the dumped firmware should turn up where it's getting the location of and method to decode the data. That would give you enough to keep digging.

That sounds fairly unlikely (the BIOS does executes some code from PCI devices, but he says this happens on a machine without any weird PCI device, and PCI ROMs can be dumped too). We would not have to discuss whether this is the case if BIOS dumps turned out to be different. The issue is that 3 years after discovering the malware, he hasn't even tried to dump his BIOS.

Compression and encryption at this stage would be obfuscation more than anything else, and it's the job of malware researchers to break these kind of obfuscation layer. But again, we have no proof of this even being present.

The BIOS is not a black box that can't be analyzed.

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