Are SD cards 'raw'?
I thought that they have their own ARM processors inside together with (updatable?) firmware. You can buy wifi-enabled cards, for instance.
OTOH, I assume they don't have direct access to the USB bus and so can't pretend to be other devices. But that still leaves lots of room to do nasty things with the data 'secured' on it.
Doesn't the laptop boot from the DVD drive? If it's already busy being used for the operating system, it can't be used for input/output.
Re:The DNSSEC Root Signing Ceremony
by scintill76 on Thursday November 12, 2015 @05:33AM
(#10552331)
Add another optical drive. The USB they've already got would probably be OK, as an optical disc is more "inert" than a USB flash drive.
Or, you could probably copy the OS from the initial DVD to a ramdisk, allowing to insert a new disc to load data from.
The fact that a burnable CD should have no parts that can think actually makes using one for input and one for output probably safer (though you would then need the trusted application to include a CD/DVD burning capability).
As an alternative, a 'raw' interface, such as an actual programmable flash device or maybe an SD card could work.