[Cryptography] Plot to brick BIOS (was Re: General Keith.. so great to see you..

Caspar Bowden (lists) lists at casparbowden.net
Thu May 8 03:17:45 EDT 2014


On 07/05/14 13:10, John Young wrote:
> ...At 10:28 PM 5/6/2014, you wrote:
>> On Tue, 6 May 2014 13:12:13 -0700
>> coderman <coderman at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> > http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/5/6/nsa-chief-google.html
>>
>>
>>         " NSA cyberdefense chief Debora Plunkett in December disclosed
>>         that the agency had thwarted a âEURoeBIOS plotâEUR? by a 
>> âEURoenation-state,âEUR?
>>         identified as China, to brick U.S. computers. "

Have not understood what is laughable about this. Is this supposedly 
technically absurd (I don't see why)

This appears also to be alluded to in FOIed Google emails 
<http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/5/6/nsa-chief-google.html>:

  * /Alexander: For example, over the last 18 months, we (primarily
    Intel, AMD [Advanced Micro Devices], HP [Hewlett-Packard], Dell and
    Microsoft on the industry side) completed an effort to secure the
    BIOS of enterprise platforms to address a threat in that area./
  * Is that about UEFI - and what exactly? Is "Enduring Security
    Framework" taking the credit/blame for UEFI "secure" boot?

It's quite important whether this is "let's-brick-all-of-US-plot" was 
true/untrue - why aren't people focussing on that?

CB
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/attachments/20140508/9f121708/attachment.html>


More information about the cryptography mailing list