Full Disclosure mailing list archives
Re: Firewire Attack on Windows Vista
From: "Stefan Kanthak" <stefan.kanthak () nexgo de>
Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2008 15:12:31 +0100
Larry Seltzer wrote:
WRT the DMA access over FireWire it's but a bad response since itdoesn't get the point!1. Drive encryption won't help against reading the memory. 2. The typical user authentication won't help, we're at hardware level here, and no OS needs to be involved. 3. The computer is up (and running; see above), no hibernate or sleep is involved here.So on a freshly-booted system with drive encryption you can read whatever you want on the disk?
No. As another poster already wrote: there's no(t yet a) disk involved. The attacker just reads the memory and can then try to find cached credentials or cryptographic keys (as described in the paper by Ed Felten et al). But let's take it further: Windows uses TCP/IP over IEEE 1394 in standard setup, so after getting the cached credentials of an Administrator from memory an attacker can successfully (I assume a standard setup where the Windows firewall allows accesses from the own subnet) mount \\target\C$ or \\target\ADMIN$ and thus read the files on the disk. If only drive encryption is used, the files are decrypted by the target.
4. Group policies can be circumvented, even by a limited user.<http://blogs.technet.com/markrussinovich/archive/2005/12/12/circumventi ng-group-policy-as-a-limited-user.aspx> What he says is that some group policies, not including system-wide security settings, maybe circumvented, even by a limited user.
Right. The point is that group policies can/might help, but are not "fool proof". Stefan Kanthak _______________________________________________ Full-Disclosure - We believe in it. Charter: http://lists.grok.org.uk/full-disclosure-charter.html Hosted and sponsored by Secunia - http://secunia.com/
Current thread:
- Re: Firewire Attack on Windows Vista, (continued)
- Re: Firewire Attack on Windows Vista Bryon Roche (Mar 07)
- Re: Firewire Attack on Windows Vista Larry Seltzer (Mar 08)
- Re: Firewire Attack on Windows Vista Tim (Mar 08)
- Re: Firewire Attack on Windows Vista Larry Seltzer (Mar 08)
- Re: Firewire Attack on Windows Vista Tim (Mar 08)
- Message not available
- Re: Firewire Attack on Windows Vista Larry Seltzer (Mar 09)
- Re: Firewire Attack on Windows Vista Stefan Kanthak (Mar 09)
- Re: Firewire Attack on Windows Vista Larry Seltzer (Mar 09)
- Re: Firewire Attack on Windows Vista Jardel Weyrich (Mar 09)
- Re: Firewire Attack on Windows Vista Kern (Mar 10)
- Re: Firewire Attack on Windows Vista Stefan Kanthak (Mar 10)
- Re: Firewire Attack on Windows Vista FD (Mar 12)
- Re: Firewire Attack on Windows Vista Eric Rachner (Mar 12)
- Re: Firewire Attack on Windows Vista Erik Trulsson (Mar 09)
- Re: Firewire Attack on Windows Vista Pavel Kankovsky (Mar 15)
- Re: Firewire Attack on Windows Vista Thor (Hammer of God) (Mar 06)
- Re: Firewire Attack on Windows Vista Daniel O'Connor (Mar 05)
- Re: Firewire Attack on Windows Vista Tonnerre Lombard (Mar 05)
- Re: Firewire Attack on Windows Vista Tim (Mar 06)