Security News > 2024 > July > Smash-and-Grab Extortion

As shown, mission-critical firmware, security firmware, and handler mode firmware are protected by the pmode barrier and run in privileged mode or hmode.

As shown in the figure, umode firmware is divided into isolated partitions.

If a hacker penetrates one umode partition, he cannot access data or code in other partitions.

As a consequence a hacker may disable the functionality of one umode partition, but not others.

During an attack, the breached partition can be stopped, the malware exorcised, and the partition rebooted to resume normal operation.

Partitioning enables siloing, which can mitigate insider threats, and provides hardware enforcement of certain good programming practices, which might lead to more on-time deliveries!

News URL

https://thehackernews.com/2024/07/smash-and-grab-extortion.html