Sanity check time- Firmware exploits as new vector for cyberattack?

[Leo Mauler]

The physical switch is both the best possible choice,
and the only one which will never be acceptable to a
proprietary company because it gives power to the
consumer.

--- "Monty J. Harder" <mjharder at gmail.com> wrote:

> Of course it's a danger.  If you build hardware that
> allows the firmware to
> be updated remotely, you're vulnerable to malware
> that deliberately bricks
> it.
> 
> Good design for firmware would put a very minimal
> block of code in true ROM,
> which would be sufficient to load a firmware update
> into flash memory.  It
> might require physical access to a special switch to
> do that, but it would
> prevent bricking the hardware due to a bad flash
> operation, whether
> malicious or merely accidental.
> 
> Another option is to include a large public RSA key
> for the hardware
> manufacturer in the ROM, which would be used to
> authenticate any firmware
> updates.  Since that smacks of "tivoization", I'd
> say allowing the owner of
> the hardware to bypass that with the aforementioned
> physical switch would
> probably be a good bet; just use the RSA key to
> validate remotely loaded
> updates.
> 
> 
> 
> On Tue, May 20, 2008 at 11:34 PM, Oren Beck
> <orenbeck at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> >
>
http://www.darkreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=154270&WT.svl=news1_1
> >
> > Bull or danger?
> >
> > --
> > Oren Beck
> >
> > 816.729.3645
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