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PaperclipPerfector  27d ago (text post)   34294 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 28, 2024

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As long as the machines use disk encryption, having the BIOS password doesn’t allow you to log in or tamper with the data. It would allow an attacker to completely blow away the data a little quicker than they could otherwise. No idea if they do use disk encryption. If they don’t that would be a bigger scandal in my book.

Setting a BIOS password would allow an attacker to install a modified version of the loader that performs decryption (which is not, itself, encrypted, because obviously). The attack would then have to leave the machine, let it be used at least once by the legitimate owner (thus entering the correct password) and then return again to harvest whatever they wanted.

This is a well-studied attack pattern.

Yeah, that’s true, though I think TPMs might be able to prevent that since they will check the boot image and are involved in data decryption. I’m not sure if having the BIOS password allows you to subvert that though. I think the way it works is that the key or part of the key is registered with the TPM and then it asserts about the boot image hash before releasing that key, so it is only possibly to use known good boot images to decrypt your data. Maybe having the BIOS password would allow you to reset the TPM, but I think there is no way to do that without clobbering the key it stores.

No idea if these machines have that set up though.

Owning the BIOS/UEFI means you get to feed the CPU the microcode update on boot, it also means you get SMM (Ring -2 access), which is so game over it's not even funny.

That doesn’t matter with a correctly configured TPM though. The decryption process for the disk includes a key stored in the TPM, which is never revealed, and the TPM itself verifies the boot image (which is the thing responsible for decrypting the data).

You can definitely boot whatever you want, and even trick the user into inputting their password, but if that password is only half the decryption key, you can’t actually go in and tamper with any of the data. You could still replace it wholesale or send the password somewhere else for further attacks, so it’s not nothing, but it’s also not as bad as if the TPM was not set up to do boot attestation.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/hardware-security/tpm/tpm-fundamentals#measured-boot-with-support-for-attestation

the TPM itself verifies the boot image

You don't comprehend the degree of breach UEFI/bios can cause do you? The TPM itself can't verify diddly squat even over DMA if the motherboard MCU, CPU have their microcode compromised. In the worst possible scenario the implanted compromised code will simply wait for the machine to boot then start exfiltrating or altering data. And there's NOTHING you can do about it. The Intel ME is a separate processor with unrestricted access to main memory, all the registers of the processor, dma, the hdd, everything. There isn't an attestation mechanism possible for you to inspect and verify what the hell is going on in that thing if the firmware uploaded to the cpu on boot was compromised. As you'd expect from a nation state tier adversary they would have the keys to sign their own microcode patch for intel/amd.

I was going to write about BitLocker, but I doubt people that store BIOS passwords in Excel sheets think about disk encryption much.

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