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RE: Maybe...

Comment comment by VnutZ on 14 March 2008

The iPod was just a simple example because they can run an operating system and drive (when present) their firewire port. The attack isn't dependent on the device appearing or acting like a hard drive. It directly communicates with the underlying hardware utilizing the DMA controller which is made available via the Firewire protocol. So the attack is after the contents of RAM rather than the contents of the host's drives.

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RE: Maybe... by PowerPointSamurai :: NR7

I really can't think of much else that would work though. I have a Firewire digital camcorder, a scanner, and some external hard drives, but I can only imagine the latter working for this hack.

And again, the target disk mode has been around on the Mac for a long time, so it kind of bewilders me that this would pop up as a vulnerability on the PC after all this time.

(With the target disk mode on the Mac, I can plug two Macs together by a Firewire cable, boot up the first, and hold down a key combo on the second to start it up as an external hard drive for the first. This is really handy for data recovery or diagnostics if something goes really wrong with your system. But, this has been around for a while, and there are safeguards against unauthorized access.)

Posted 15 March 2008, Hide, Parent, Reply