Re:“We have obtained fully functional JTAG for Intel CSME vi...
by gargravarr on Friday November 10, 2017 @09:35AM
(#15670083)
The problem is hard mostly because the entire architecture of the personal computer made absolutely no provision for security. Everything is patches upon patches to add superficial security. Fundamentally, a computer is dumb, it will perform whatever task it is told to do, and all our security measures revolve around stopping a malicious actor from telling the computer to do something 'bad'. Eventually, someone gets around the bouncer or in through an open window and here we are.
IOMMU effectively solves the "DMA is completely broken" problem, as far as I'm aware.
Evil Maid attacks are mostly worrisome because even UEFI cannot protect you against some bootloader attacks (what if you disable UEFI or reflash the firmware and then have a bootloader that just looks like a UEFI boot). There are some usages of TPMs that seem quite promising (they revolve around doing a reverse-TOTP-style verification of your laptop to ensure that the TPM has certified the entire boot chain).
It's quite a hard problem, made significantly harder by the fact that every fucking hardware vendor seems to want to make our machines even less secure.