Re:LoJax: First UEFI rootkit found in the wild, courtesy of ...
by upofadown on Friday September 28, 2018 @09:41PM
(#18098263)
You are describing some sort of firmware modification attack. That is not what this is. If the software stub is not actively downloaded by the OS then it can't run. This exploit is very specific to a bonehead thing Windows does. No other OS (e.g. Linux) would be vulnerable.
Re:LoJax: First UEFI rootkit found in the wild, courtesy of ...
by TrueDuality on Sunday September 30, 2018 @01:56AM
(#18104698)
You're talking about an attack against the agent this is designed to download, or you don't understand what a UEFI attack is. This is an attack against the UEFI part, not the agent. This isn't firmware, but it is pre-bootloader. UEFI is the bootloader that loads your bootloader and is stored not on your hard drive.
If software at this level is malicious, it has equal privileges as your BIOS before any kernel gets loaded. It doesn't matter what the operating system is, it just has to be designed for it. It can return TPM approved checksums to your kernel and continue a secure boot as long as it knew what those checksums were before it modified them. Oh you use an external drive for your unencrypted boot partition? That can be modified as it is read off disk, before you're ever prompted for a disk passphrase, and it will report the correct checksum before it gets loaded.
This is a vicious level of access for malicious software, and it is OS agnostic as far as the attack goes. THIS instance is Windows only because that is what it was targeted at.
Where this code lives they can sit passively by until you've decrypted your hard drive (capturing your key in the process), patch the kernel with a rootkit, and start processes or drop files that will be invisible and inaccessible to even other kernel processes.
This isn't a vulnerability in Windows, or Linux. This is drinking from a polluted pool before they come into existence and poisoning the system.