Hacking BIOS chips isn't just the NSA's domain anymore

Of course this assumes that automated discovery is not very computationally intensive, which in some cases it appears to be. The search space of a program is enormous. Instead one possible world is one in which exploits can be found automatically, but discovery requires massive computational effort. This seems extremely likely to me because exploits that don't require massive computational effort will be found and limited quickly eliminating the low hanging fruit.o

Thus governments with the best algorithms and the most money/powerplants/datacenters/fabs have an advantage because they can patch their own software while developing exploits for other peoples software.

The strategy comes in at:

1. how many exploits do you keep in reserve given a particular rate of discovery, and how and when do you use exploits?

2. How do you handle the case when you and the target are using the same software? If you start to patch it, the exploit might leak to the target. If you use the exploit before patching, the target might use it against you.

Operationally protecting exploits from spies seems hard. A government with a technical advantage might well be a disadvantage to a less technically savvy government with a human intelligence advantage.

To quote the Honey Badger video:

>"You do all the work for us, honey badger, and we'll just eat whatever you find, how's that? What'daya say, stupid?"

To avoid this a government might use the exploit development capability only defensively in peace time, keeping no reserve of exploits, until they have an immediate need. Of course this might weaken deterrence.

tl;dr cyber

As for tablets: they may not have been the revolution that some people hoped for, but the lock-in to a walled garden happened anyway with the iphone. Apple has done more long-term damage to the computer industry than anybody else by convincing way to many software authors - who should really know better - that paying to write and publish software is sane.

Instead of fighting this when it was small, we are now faced with a future where even the hardware can work against the user who wants a true General Purpose Computer. We've already seen BIOS lockouts such as the recent thinkpad "boot guard" idiocy. It will get really bad once we start to see Intel "SGX" and the "trusted execution environment" it is intended to enable[1]. So now we get to fight at the hardware level, too.

As for using vulnerabilities to root the device - that is not a strategy to fight this, and merely cedes the fight to the people that are afraid of what it means to be "turing complete".

Unfortunately, I suspect that we are too late. Fighting this trend now requires sacrifice. Stop giving any money to any business that uses these anti-user technologies. Yes, that includes Intel and many others. Stop writing software or making embedded products that rely on these kinds of features. Yes, this might mean quitting a nice job. No, I expect instead that the people that should know better will continue supporting the enemy by buying their products. I expect they will stay on as collaborators.

[1] this should scare anybody that wants a future where that still has general purpose computers: http://www.arm.com/images/GP_Standardization_500.png

In which case Google would most likely simply have used a BSD variant as Apple did.

There's always reverse-engineering... an option which I believe could be far more powerful, and Stallman should've argued for; the ability (and right) to figure out what some software does and modify it is the fundamental key to the freedom he argues for, and while having the source code can certainly help, it's not the only possibility.

The power of RE comes from the fact that, while it's very easy to not release source code, it's nearly impossible to prevent someone from reading the binary on a general-purpose computer regardless of what the legal situation is.

Regarding the switches/jumpers, hardware is now complex enough to set up that a wakeup after suspend requires more data than what CPUs can store by themselves to revive memory without data loss. That data ends up in flash, so something needs to change in that area before a flash chip could be write protected with a jumper.

How much data is this? I thought it'd be stored in the CMOS NVRAM, which could be a better design.

I came to know about coreboot thanks to Chromebooks. If one is security conscious, what laptops with good coreboot support do you recommend? A Chromebook Pixel? New Thinkpads seem not to be supported.