Your Mac Is Vulnerable To Thunderbolt Hacks And You Can't Do Anything About It

Dubbed Thunderstrike, the vulnerability reportedly allows a custom-crafted malicious Thunderbolt device to flash code to the boot ROM. In a lengthy video posted to ccc-tv, Hudson demoes how persistent firmware modifications can be fed into the EFI boot ROM of MacBooks equipped with Thunderbolt ports.



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could you re-flash the firmware to get rid of this, of does it totally brick the machine?

i had this idea once of building a computer inside of a safe (with holes and such to get access to things like usb ports), and using full-disk encryption on the hard drives just for extra measure in case they tried to boot with a flash drive or something then they couldn't read my disks. my machine does not support thunderbolt since it isn't a mac, tho i'm sure you could use a flash drive to flash it with something custom and malicious if you could reboot and bypass the OS, tho with the machine being in the safe that might be difficult to do ;p

 

@ ace_k
Why are you trying to build a PC in a safe? Other than the novelty status, you're probably better off getting a small laptop with full disk encryption and then locking the laptop in the safe.

The fact that someone can access the computer at all isn't good (from maximum overdrive security point-of-view). A lot of BIOS/Firmware/Whatever have back doors or some kind of algorithm for generating a password to access the BIOS/EFI.

 

Apple is preparing a fix but only for part of the vulnerability.

 

it sounds like a DMA issue. not familiar with the workings of thunderbolt but devices attached to system busses like PCI-E can access memory low level without having to go through the cpu or kernel sys calls.