On Sat, Jan 7, 2017 at 11:35 AM, Stefan Sperling <s...@stsp.name> wrote: > On Sat, Jan 07, 2017 at 10:16:39AM -0500, Kenneth Gober wrote: >> The difference is, closed source firmware runs on the device itself >> and if it's buggy, generally the most it will do is make the device >> appear to be non-functional or unreliable. > > If a PCI device has unrestricted DMA access, as is the case in most laptops > and PCs today as far as I know (no IOMMU), it can do a lot of damage. > In this case firmware running on devices essentially has root privileges > on the OS since the firmware could modify arbitrary memory. > > It all boils down to whether you trust hardware vendors to not use their > powers against you. There is nothing an OS kernel could do to prevent > attacks at this level.
Quite so. I actually had a few sentences on this but I deleted them due to it straying too far off topic. But the end result as you say is, if you don't trust the hardware don't use it. An OpenBSD firmware prompt is not going to make you safe from malicious hardware. -ken
