Salut, Roger, On Wed, 5 Mar 2008 16:30:35 -0500, Roger A. Grimes wrote: > As somewhat indicated in the paper itself, these types of physical > DMA attacks are possible against any PC-based OS, not just Windows. > If that's true, why is the paper titled around Windows Vista? That's very easy: because the specific attack was against Windows Vista's activation mechanism. The deficiencies of Firewire with regard to direct memory access have been known for quite a while now. The purpose of the referenced attack was specific to Windows Vista. It is of course also possible though to steal GnuPG keys from the memory of a Solaris machine, of course, that's in the nature of the beast, but this is not relevant to the specific attack mentioned here. May I also add that I am actually aware of patches from vendors which can render this attack ineffective for most other OSes (Solaris, Linux, etc.) - as far as I know, though, there is no such patch for Windows? That might also be a reason why this attack was created and published in the first place - like I said, the attack vector has been known for ages now. > [Disclaimer: I'm a full-time Microsoft employee.] Hi there. ;-) Tonnerre -- SyGroup GmbH Tonnerre Lombard Solutions Systematiques Tel:+41 61 333 80 33 Güterstrasse 86 Fax:+41 61 383 14 67 4053 Basel Web:www.sygroup.ch tonnerre.lombard@xxxxxxxxxx
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