From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Date: Thu, 21 Jul 2005 08:13:33 -1000 From: Tim Newsham To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@cse.psu.edu> Subject: Re: [9fans] First-timer help In-Reply-To: <4878.1121962344@piper.nectar.cs.cmu.edu> Message-ID: References: <4878.1121962344@piper.nectar.cs.cmu.edu> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed Topicbox-Message-UUID: 6dc38b10-ead0-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 >> Yah, now you're just trusting the bios, the local disk (if any) >> and the network. Much more secure ;-) > > If you can't trust the BIOS, you can't trust *anything* about > the machine. The original thread mentioned false login screens that people can leave running in unix. What I meant to imply (perhaps too subtly) was that you can configure the BIOS to boot a malicious plan9 kernel (by adjusting bios parameters, by leaving a boot block on the disk, or by interposing on the network boot process). Rebooting the machine does not necessarily give you strong assurances against trojan login screens. (Of course it can, if configured properly -- ie trusted booting of signed binaries). Sure you can put a tiny cdr into the drive, but what if the bios doesn't even boot the cdr (or refuses to, and has a password). What if it boots the hard drive while making it look like its booting the CDR? > Dave Eckhardt Tim Newsham http://www.lava.net/~newsham/