UEFI News and Commentary

Wednesday, June 07, 2017

UEFI Releases New Specifications and Adds ARM to the Board

For anyone who has been working on the UEFI specification, for the past few years, it should be no surprise to hear that UEFI has decided to welcome ARM onto the board of directors. This shows the growth of interest in firmware standards by the non-x86 world and also recognizes ARM's outstanding level of effort to improving the specifications. Dong Wei, who was the vice president of UEFI while at HP, now returns to the same role but now from ARM, where he is the senior director platform architecture. This seems like a smart move on both sides.

This announcement came on the heels of the release of a spate of new spec and test tool revisions. There are a whole bunch of goodies in here, from wifi and BlueTooth to new SMM (now called MM) models (including TrustZone!).


There are rumblings about another UEFI plugfest in the works. More on what's changes in the specs and other industry happenings later.

Thursday, June 01, 2017

UEFI Security In The News: Craigslist, Zimmer & Cyber-Security Meet Ups

Using a UEFI-based BIOS on a MacBook Pro/Air and forgot your password and live in New York, New Jersey or Connecticut? Craigslist to the rescue! From the ad:
REMOVAL PROCESS: the password removal process will NOT damage your Macbook or VOID your Apple warranty in any way we do not modify any hardware nor do we use any software to remove the password a professional external password analyser will be used to remove the EFI Firmware BIOS Password and/or the iCloud System Lock PIN Code the repair turnaround will take 1 HOUR
Not sure how this works and I don't have a Mac, but some people have done extensive reverse engineering to look at it and found it pretty solid. Barring access to a hardware flash programmer "...there is no way for an outsider to generate the codes to reset your Mac firmware. So please stop sending me emails and comments asking for it."

Meanwhile, everyone seems to be trying to hack the firmware, even to the point where firmware guys are starting to worry about how solid the firmware written by other guys really is. My friend and co-author Vincent Zimmer gives a pretty good round up of the current findings and presentations, including some of his own.

Meanwhile, the local chapter of CS2AI is sponsoring a series of security meetings that gathers local industry practitioners and educators together to discuss different topics surrounding IT and control-system security. Last time the focus was on "The Mind of a Cyber Attacker" The next topic will be Defensive Tools for Cyber-Security, hosted by Prof. Jun Dai at Sacramento State University. Recent sessions have been hosted by speakers from McAfee, Palo Alto Networks and Grimm. Good stuff, practical from the physical, hardware, software and network attacks.

Some OEMs are more paranoid than others. In the firmware world, that keeps us on our toes to engineer creative solutions that make systems buildable, shippable and usable but not vulnerable.