New UEFI vulnerabilities send firmware devs industry wide scrambling
New UEFI vulnerabilities send firmware devs industry wide scrambling
PixieFail is a huge deal for cloud and data centers. For the rest, less so.
Not at all surprised, motherboard firmware from most vendors has always been a steaming pile of shit code, often not even built to spec.
The nine vulnerabilities that comprise PixieFail reside in TianoCore EDK II, an open source implementation of the UEFI specification. The implementation is incorporated into offerings from Arm Ltd., Insyde, AMI, Phoenix Technologies, and Microsoft. The flaws reside in functions related to IPv6, the successor to the IPv4 Internet Protocol network address system. They can be exploited in what’s known as the PXE, or Preboot Execution Environment, when it’s configured to use IPv6.
Not all hardware manufacturers are effected and it's based on a specific open source implementation of UEFI.
Who could have predicted bootloader drm wouldn't go well?
Short for Unified Extensible Firmware Interface, UEFI is the low-level and complex chain of firmware responsible for booting up virtually every modern computer.
The flaws reside in functions related to IPv6, the successor to the IPv4 Internet Protocol network address system. They can be exploited in what’s known as the PXE, or Preboot Execution Environment, when it’s configured to use IPv6.and : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/UEFI
... UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) replaces the BIOS (Basic Input Output Software) which was present in the boot ROM (Read Only Memory) of all personal computers ...
When does a machine ever need IP6?
PXE, or network boot. It is basically never used (and rarely enabled, if ever, by default) by the individual, but can be helpful in, for example, a large scale OS deployment. Say IT has to get their corporate image version of Windows 10/11 installed on 30 new laptops. They could write a ton of flash drives, but it'd be easier to just host a PXE boot server and every laptop just listen to them.
V6 specifically in that instance would just be for the reason of "we need to move away from v4 anyways"
Running matter/thread for safer IoT
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The vulnerabilities, which collectively have been dubbed PixieFail by the researchers who discovered them, pose a threat mostly to public and private data centers and possibly other enterprise settings.
People with even minimal access to such a network—say a paying customer, a low-level employee, or an attacker who has already gained limited entry—can exploit the vulnerabilities to infect connected devices with a malicious UEFI.
By installing malicious firmware that runs prior to the loading of a main OS, UEFI infections can’t be detected or removed using standard endpoint protections.
The malicious image in this scenario will establish a permanent beachhead on the device that’s installed prior to the loading of the OS and any security software that would normally flag infections.
This kind of access may be possible when someone has a legitimate account with a cloud service or after first exploiting a separate vulnerability that gives limited system rights.
When the client-{based server] boots, the attacker just needs to send the client a malicious packet in the [request] response that will trigger some of these vulns.
The original article contains 703 words, the summary contains 177 words. Saved 75%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
"See?? I knew our project to transition to IPv6 was a security issue." -Network