Filed under: News — techtics @ 12:59 am

During the CanSecWest/core06-conference has been published that the TOP ( Thermal Overheat Protection )-functionality of x86-processors can be abused by hackers. According to Loïc Duflot, a computersecurity expert of the French government, is it possible to abuse the routines that normally are been used when the processor is getting to hot and as a result of that, you can gain access to the System Management Mode. At that point a hacker could leave his own code, that results in full access to the system. This is because SMM offers a piece of memory that is separated from the rest of the cpu. The code that runs in that piece of memory can access the rest of the computer memory.

The hack can only be executed with official and documented functionality and therefore does not rely on abuse of bugs. Vulnerable cpu’s that are mentioned are the Pentium 4 and the Xeon, but SMM has been used since the 80386 in de x86-architecture so that we
can state that without a doubt current AMD’s are vulnerable too. A Proof-of-Concept exploit was demonstrated in OpenBSD, but the vulnerability can be exploited in other operating systems too.

More