Inception: firewire password bypass for Windows, OSX and Ubuntu login

Re:Inception: firewire password bypass for Windows, OSX and ... by mkelley on Friday October 12, 2012 @09:36PM (#4647567)

I'm not a security expert... but I'd love to hear from one about this. I know the old rule about physical access means your computer is pretty much 0wned already, but this seems to make it phenomenally easy.... especially considering this statement:

As of version 0.2.0, it is able to unlock Windows 8 SP0, Windows 7 SP0-1, Vista SP0 and SP2, Windows XP SP2-3, Mac OS X Snow Leopard, Lion and Mountain Lion, Ubuntu 11.04, 11.10 and 12.04 x86 and x64-bit machines. Signatures are added by request. <--- Basically these are the OS's we've done so far, many more to come!

tl; dr; Can we get a security wizard's input on this tool?

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Re:Inception: firewire password bypass for Windows, OSX and ... by georgemcbay on Friday October 12, 2012 @10:58PM (#4647742)

I'm not a security wizard but I do follow security technology enough to know that this is not a wholly new attack. See, for example (from 2006):

http://eh2008.koeln.ccc.de/fahrplan/attachments/1068_SEAT139...

This is not a Firewire specific thing either, even much newer versions of these types of DMA access channels (like Thunderbolt) suffer from the same problems in most implementations.

While this isn't a new thing, having an easily available all-in-one tool like this (assuming it works, I haven't tested it personally) is a bit of a "Firesheep" moment in that it could bring what was always possible but kind of geeky-hard to the masses in one easy to use tool, which could wreak a lot of havoc.

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