More ways to gain access to systems you have physical access to

[ Thanks to j00p34 for this link. ]

"DMA
The DMA attack is based on a "feature" of firewire which gives it direct read/write access to memory.

"DMA as most of you probably know is a feature used to speed up access to memory by bypassing the processor, this is needed for instance by graphic cards which do their own processing on data in memory. It's a great enhancement to allow for speedy input/output of data where the main processor is not needed. The firewire protocol allows external devices to directly access memory for read/write operations. This makes it easily possible to change data in system memory using an external device (like a modified ipod for example)

"root access
This can give you root access to a running Linux system as long as it has a working firewire port. You can read more about this specific security flaw as well as methods of mitigating it here (the part about windows is especially amusing)"

Complete Story

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