News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Apple MacBooks Can Be Hacked Through The Battery. Parent comment

Re:Apple MacBooks Can Be Hacked Through The Battery by kevingadd on Saturday July 23, 2011 @02:29AM (#2796361)
It's kind of a degree beyond the traditional 'physical access' attack though. This means that if you buy a replacement battery for your MacBook, it could contain malware. In fact, even the legitimate battery you purchased from Apple could maintain malware, if someone slipped it in at the manufacturer. You could say that traditional vetting of manufacturers and security processes would prevent this, but really, who's going to think of the potential for a battery to compromise your security?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Apple MacBooks Can Be Hacked Through The Battery by YooLi on Saturday July 23, 2011 @09:08AM (#2796854)
Then so could the replacement hard drive, any USB sticks you buy, any USB connecting peripheral, etc.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Apple MacBooks Can Be Hacked Through The Battery by reustle on Saturday July 23, 2011 @11:45AM (#2797084)
Not quite, there is already heavy protection against nasty peripheral devices.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Apple MacBooks Can Be Hacked Through The Battery by SpikeGronim on Saturday July 23, 2011 @12:03PM (#2797122)
I don't think so. Certainly not for any peripheral that is allowed to do DMA. Though plugging in a malicious firewire peripheral is a lot more practical than replacing the battery...

http://www.hermann-uwe.de/blog/physical-memory-attacks-via-f...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Apple MacBooks Can Be Hacked Through The Battery by electromagnetic on Saturday July 23, 2011 @12:38PM (#2797213)
When there's already semi-legitimate worries that the Chinese government could have spyware chips installed on computer motherboards, this would be a lot more malicious, easier to perform and initially far less detectable.

From the post, the author says the battery could repeatedly install malware or spyware to your computer.

What would be more worrying is if someone found a way to hack directly to you battery. IE a virus you get installs itself to your battery as its resurrection method rather than in a system file. Worse yet would be if someone maliciously wrote a virus that caused your battery to overcharge a month down the road.

Imagine all those stupid MSN virus' if they could fry your laptop battery.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Apple MacBooks Can Be Hacked Through The Battery by SpikeGronim on Tuesday July 26, 2011 @11:33AM (#2807789)
You don't need a government's resources. You need a programmable firewire device, like an embedded Linux device. You also need ten seconds of physical access to their FireWire port. That's a lot easier than hacking a battery and convincing the target to use the battery.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Apple MacBooks Can Be Hacked Through The Battery by tptacek on Saturday July 23, 2011 @07:30PM (#2798144)
Even Charlie Miller says he doesn't know how you would embed malware on a device using this attack.

That's of course beyond the point that a great many other things you buy at a computer store could more easily contain malware.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Apple MacBooks Can Be Hacked Through The Battery by stcredzero on Saturday July 23, 2011 @11:04AM (#2797021)
How is that different from hacking the ASIC of the network card?

http://www.links.org/?p=330

[ Parent | on HN ]