Researchers Demo Exploits Bypassing UEFI Secure Boot Researchers demonstrated at Black Hat this week two attacks that bypassed Secure Boot in order to install a UEFI bootkit — boot rootkit — on affected computers. The first exploit works because certain vendors do not properly protect their firmware, allowing an attacker to modify the code responsible for enforcing Secure Boot, said researcher Yuriy Bulygin, who works at McAfee. The second exploit demonstrated by the researchers can run in user mode, which means that an attacker would only need to gain code execution rights on the system by exploiting a vulnerability in a regular application like Java, Adobe Flash, Microsoft Office or others. In both cases, the exploits are possible not because of vulnerabilities in Secure Boot itself, but because of UEFI implementation errors made by platform vendors." Of course, a hardware security system that is too complex to verify seems like a fatal flaw.
Posted on: Sat, 03 Aug 2013 15:19:58 +0000