😳
We desperately need to get rid of big tech. It’s all trash. Of course some standard made by corporate types is going to be shiftily made enough to have a buffer overflow
The alternative to private business developing these things is that the alternative is to have it in control and development in the hands of the government.
Which means higher taxes
I am okay with this.
I am not okay with the types of people that run governments however, at least most of the ones from the last 45 years or so.
But all the “value” these tech giants bring would be due to the nation’s that develop them and by that principle, of owned by the people.
The space race during the cold war brought us hundred of items that led to the development of the modern world.
Email changed everything. Then globally connected computers.
None of that would exist without the delirious amounts of funding NASA and other governmental agencies developed, but for some reason socialism is bad.
Nope. That’s a false dichotomy AND a slippery slope.
I said a lot of things, your comment is useless unless you choose to explain yourself
There’s multiple alternative ways, and the slippery slope is hIgHeR tAxEs!!
ways such as…?
And what’s your issue with taxes? Taxes are necessary and incredibly useful things. Its how the government has any money to do anything at all…
I think more taxes should already be collected from tech companies, and many others.
Why did you write higher taxes in that idiotic way?
I have a motherboard with a botched bios I can’t restore stuck in a boot loop over secure boot issues. I can’t even reach the bios config screen to clear it out or reflash. I wonder if this would rescue it.
Have you tried removing the CMOS battery?
Yes. Didn’t help. That board is dead. Secure boot sucks
Hmm. There might be a way to manually flash the storage/memory but it’d be hard.
Storage was removed. Still wouldn’t reach firmware. The bios needs reflashed and this stupid board has no recovery because WHY DOESNT IT HAVE A RECOVERY FEATURE!?
The firmware should be on an EEPROM or something
It’s on a bios chip that I desolder, reflash, and solder again.
If I had the skills and the reader.
So I’m just merging more things into one server and reducing power consumption by collapsing VMs into containers to offset the difference.
sh.itjust.works
Not the motherboard
Yeah its not worth the effort. Wanted to check just in case you didn’t :3
The parties that discovered CVE-2026-97631—Alex Matrosov of Anthropic and Dan Holmes-Mitra of Google—had arranged for it to stay under wraps until a coordinated disclosure that was scheduled for January. AMI, a maker of motherboards and other hardware, published this pull request last month that detailed the vulnerability and included a code fix. Once the post came to the attention of the discovering parties, TianoCore Project members published a public advisory last week.
Dear OpenAI: This is responsible disclosure. Please take note as to not ruin peoples weekends so you can say “look what our API did!”
Does this one have any piracy implications? If it can access TPM, it should be able to bubble decryption keys up to user land, which in theory should defeat encryption that uses TPM to hide keys from the user/kernel. Might also defeat denuvo.
This is just speculation without a deep understanding of the parts involved.
That’s not how that works. If they shipped private keys they would have been leaked by now
The whole point of TPM is to enable passing keys so users can still view content (which needs to be decrypted to be shown at all) without being able to access the keys themselves (because it has its own public/private keys and the keys are encrypted using the public keys and the private ones aren’t supposed to be visible outside of TPM).
If this exploit gives access to TPM and its private key, then you can use that to decrypt keys as they are sent and then decrypt a copy of the content that gets saved as such (instead of immediately re-encrypted with your monitor’s public key so you can’t just intercept the signal on the wire, which is also why HDMI has been unwilling to license an open source implementation because those details could reveal flaws and just one flaw could mean all media up to this point is now piratable without an insider leaking anything).
Ohhhh. I see. I read your comment wrong.
Also, HDMI is a bad example because you can 10000% strip HDCP
In the PXE boot code. Very low risk for the vast majority of people.
You also need to have sufficiently infiltrated the target’s local network to masquerade as a PXE server, and be in a position to force a server to reboot / just wait for one to reboot. Yes, a few places have large, fairly open networks with a lot of devices configure to PXE boot and they should apply the update before the next reboot, but vast majority of people, no issue at all.
If a hacker can get PXE boot working reliably I’d hire them
It’s how I installed Arch btw on my desktop, tiny boot image basically downloads the installer into RAM - NetBoot.
But yeah, if you’ve got a computer that’s old enough to be fully supported yet new enough to have the UEFI for hardware, an ethernet network which is robust enough to download full system images on every restart yet simple enough for the firmware to understand, and tonnes of memory free to hold the whole OS at all times, and you can tolerate the fact that restarts take ages, then it works great.
Reminds me of the old adage: How do you figure out if someone is an Arch user… 😁
They’ll tell you, and they’ll give you a new installation method.
Seriously though, that wiki entry is pretty neat.
I once ran out of functional flash drives and DVDs, so I SSHed into a home router, made a new dnsmasq config in the tmpfs, then killed dnsmasq and quickly ran it again but with the new config before the pile of scripts acting as init noticed and rebooted everything. I pointed it to that netboot dot xyz piece of shit. It did work, though.
Since it is remote execution in UEFI, does that mean if you compromised the system you can now use this to install a backdoor in the firmware so wiping and reinstalling won’t help?
I think the detailed description of this vulnerability described it as non-persistent in UEFI, but that you could install something that runs before secure boot that would be persistent. I think that’s splitting hairs, though - if you’ve been compromised by someone that has the skills to pull this exploit off, then they can probably chain something else into it now that they’ve got basically bare-metal access.
Thanks for clarifying this VERY relevant part.
So am I correct in understanding that this could be used to make a tool to unlock any encrypted disk that relies on the tpm whilst something like luks or indeed any solution that doesn’t rely on the bios being secure would be fine.
Note I’m talking about a stolen laptop not an evil maid situation.
Not necessarily. Luks can be used with TPM. Although I’ve never seen it in practice.
Most Linux distros offer a standard Luks with passphrase setup with just a single checkmark, but enabling TPM takes more work.
Sounds like luks is borked as well if youre using only tpm state to unlock, which you shouldnt
All of the LUKS integrations literally just store a password and then type that into the thing upon boot
These are all the US and Chinese backdoors being finally discovered and everyone is in a panic when they should be celebrating lol Good. Bring the corporate internet down, it was better when it wasn’t full of normies and post-iPhone users anyway. When the demographics skewed technical and not performative. And bring the banks down too please. I literally don’t give one shit if the world burns because it’ll burn cooler than this hell we’re already subjected to. For once, we have a chance to enact change that isn’t “just vote lmaoo i’m so smart! i’m radical chic!” so bring it on
“The vulnerability, with a severity rating of 9.5 out of 10, resides in the TianoCore EDK II, an open source codebase…”
Never wanted to uppercut somebody so bad as in 2005 when they purchased an iphone, then declared to me and everyone in earshot what a techie they are. This is a person for whom I had to uninstall incredimail almost daily, and thought that the way to send an email was to open Word, import the thing into a document then click File then click Send as Email.
I still remember the geek vs nerd facebook quiz. Gosh I forgot how iphone ushered this era of enshittification. Although, having super AI focused with the few, not sure this is a better future. Even the unabomber wrote about this.
CVE-2026-97631 doesn’t affect home and small office users, or any other users who boot their devices solely from disk drives. Instead, it applies only to organizations with machines that boot from local networks, or conceivably from Internet-connected resources.
Thank you ever so much for this comforting snippet. 🙏
So I’m guessing this means the wake on lan “magic packet”??
No, it’s a vulnerability with PXE booting, AKA “boot to network”. While most hardware has the capability (often used to load the device in the first place), I would question how many are set to use this on a routine basis.
This sounds like something scary in a lab, but nearly useless in the real world.
The parties that discovered CVE-2026-97631—Alex Matrosov of Anthropic and Dan Holmes of Google—had arranged for it to stay under wraps until a coordinated disclosure that was scheduled for January. AMI, a maker of motherboards and other hardware, published this pull request last month that detailed the vulnerability and included a code fix. Once the post came to the attention of the discovering parties, TianoCore Project members published a public advisory last week.
Hot take: botched disclosures like this should open a company to criminal liability. We need to start treating SWE with the same level of scrutiny we do other engineering fields and not “oopsie poopsie, I accidentally just disclosed an attack that endangers global infrastructure.”
Edit: Also, just of fucking course it’s a buffer overflow in C code. “No way to prevent this, says only nation where this regularly happens” vibes.
Hey now, C isn’t the only language with this problem, I’m a proud c++ dev and I assure you we get it regularly too. You just find our freedoms uncomfortable because they cause so much destruction and harm, but if you only understood the pure bliss of being allowed to do any terrible thing we can think of, you’d understand that it’s worth all the problems it causes!
That is indeed a hot take. The cve involves crafting a PXE packet, so just… Don’t use PXE in your environment.
If you do, you already know of the dangers of signing exploits in boot images, DNS shenanigans, and all that.
I’m not saying this isn’t serious, but it’s not really the end of the world.
The NSA has made both Microsoft and Apple withhold security patches to make their enemies vulnerable, but also makes the general populace vulnerable to these issues, which can or even has been continuously exploited by hacker groups under nation state actors who considers the US enemy.
So yes, they should be held liable and sued for not disclosing vulnerabilities to the world at large, because keeping it secret is inherently stupid and self defeatist.
How do you craft a PXE packet? I’m using a crafting table but I don’t see the option anywhere.
Somewhere in the NSA someone is going “damnit! They found that one too!?”
But what about all the other planets?
Neat. So are legacy BIOS actually more secure at the moment? Weird to think about but very reminiscent of that one time almost every Gigabyte™ brand mobo had an exploit tied to its online update capability.
Legacy bios ftw
This breaks protection not provided by legacy bios you are basically always at the degree of insecurity provided by this exploit.
This one appears to be sensationalist, but seeing bugs coming out of the woodwork in every layer of the stack makes you realize how vulnerable our giant tech stack is and always was. I think it’s time to hit reset and nuke the stack. Surely there is a way to create a low level, generic execution environment that doesn’t rely on this bloated ass stack. I don’t see why an application’s entire stack could not be auditable down to the machine instructions. Then, we wouldn’t all need access to super computers like today.
Ok so just don’t turn computers on anymore. Got it 👍
And touch grass like some kind of freak?? You’ll have to fight me 🔪
