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Commodity computers by design include attack vectors that allow malicious software and attackers who gain brief physical access, so-called evil maids, to take full control over the machine without the owner ever noticing.
The presentation briefly enumerates well-known attacks such as remote DMA over IEEE1349/FireWire, BIOS bootkits, AMT and closed source operating system updates to arrive at a problem statement, and moves on in search of solutions which can block the attacks completely or at least hinder them from becoming persistent, starting a layer below them all; with the schematic of a laptop mainboard.
A few relatively simple hardware modifications are identified, which together with the coreboot #goodBIOS firmware prevent two entire classes of attacks.
The result is a machine which always powers up in a known good state and which must be under attacker control for 20 minutes in order to be compromised, rather than just 20 seconds.
In closing the presentation starts a discussion about what we can do to address this problem, which exists in every single computer on the market, on a larger scale.