Simon Says – Musings of a Technology CTO

For those who follow these kinds of things, you’ll remember that back in 2004 an enterprising group of people (Maximilian Dornseif, Michael Becher, and Christian Klein) gave a series of talks on how to bypass many kinds of computer security using the FireWire ports. This attack, though obvious from reading the specification of the Firewire / i.LINK / IEEE 1394 bus, simply used a computer acting as a “rogue” device to read and modify any memory location on a target PC.

Yes, ANY memory location, and that’s quite supported, even required by the FireWire/iLink specification, which needs direct-memory-access for some devices (like iPODs) to function.

Enterprising people have written attacks that use this “exploit” to get around encryption products, and locked workstations on Mac, Linux and PC.

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