Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 11th May 2006 15:50 UTC, submitted by anonymous
A feature called System Management Mode included in modern x86 cpus opens the way to the land of kernel space and the quest for ring zero. Federico Biancuzzi interviews French researcher Loïc Duflot to learn about the System Management Mode attack, how to mitigate it, what hardware is vulnerable, and why we should be concerned with recent X Server bugs.
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Member since:
2005-07-07
"This way, the SMRAM address range is in conflict with the legacy video RAM range. So what happens is that if the CPU is running in protected mode, all accesses to the SMRAM range are forwarded by the chipset to the display adapter."
Hardware for allowing legacy conflicts, software for not using the resource the secure way. There is nothing the OS could do to prevent this. Its the X server guys who have to watch out for bugs.
But hey they say you need exact chipset->bios combination so for me this exploit is more theoretical and it is wrong to assume that it affects all PC in the world.
Good reading though.