[LinuxBIOS] SMM is evil?

[Stefan Reinauer]

Hi,

Loïc Duflot, security engineer and researcher for the scientific
division of the french Central Directorate for Information Systems
Security ("french version of the NSA"), gives some insight on fun that
can be had with the system management mode (SMM) of x86 CPUs.

See http://www.securityfocus.com/print/columnists/402 for more
information.

While, as Loïc writes later in his article, the whole issue of
exploiting SMM is pretty pointless in Linux as the super user can
conquer ring 0 without further effort, the idea of fixing what we
can fix on the bios level seems worthwhile.

If something seems as simple as setting the D_LCK bit of SMM, we should
definitely do it.. It will at least be a marketable feature against
other upcoming firmware implementations.

Comments?

Stefan


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