MESSAGE
| DATE | 2015-12-29 |
| FROM | Elfen Magix
|
| SUBJECT | Re: [Hangout-NYLXS] GRUB Vulnerability
|
THANK YOU!
--------------------------------------------
On Mon, 12/28/15, Rick Moen wrote:
Subject: Re: [Hangout-NYLXS] GRUB Vulnerability
To: hangout-at-nylxs.com
Date: Monday, December 28, 2015, 3:46 PM
Quoting Elfen Magix (elfen_magix-at-yahoo.com):
> When I was the CTO of
BizinfoPlus, our servers were at TelX, a fine
> little dat-warehouse on Houston Street at
the old Western Union
> telegraph
building. Our servers were in a combination locked
cabinet
> and when you open it, there was
not display or keyboard tray among the
>
servers.
[snip]
An utterly classic story of a
particular genre:
My local
sysadmin guild whose Board of Directors I was on for about
a
decade and a half, BayLISA, holds every
October an open-mic session
called
'Short but Cool & Sysadmin Horror Stpries'.
Your anecdote would
be perfect for the
latter category.
> The
Security flaw is not within GRUB itself, It is with
having
> physical access to the machine
from LACK OF SECURITY on the Physical
>
Level!
Exactly. The 'flaw' is
trivia when seen in proper context.
Back in WinNT 4.0 days, Microsoft Corporation
and its captive press
corps kept advising
companies that it was safe (and advised) to place
departmental file/print (etc.) servers out in
the middle of cublicle
land because the
Security Authentication Module (SAM) database resided
on an NTFS filesystem, and therefore nobody
could break in using (e.g.)
a boot
floppy.
This was a foolish
thing to allege because physical access always wins.
E.g., a determined break-in artist could visit
cubicle land after hours
or over lunch hour
toting a WinNT workstation, temporarily extract the
departmental server hard drive(s), mount
that(/those) drives in the
workstation, and
have full access to the server filesystems --
end-running trivial obstacles like BIOS
passwords and bootloader
passwords (if the
latter feature were provided by Microsoft's OS
Loader,
which it wasn't).
However, what really got wide
public notice was when Linux live CDs
like
Ultimate Boot CD started bundling Offline NT Password &
Registry
Editor[1], made possible by
betaware (first implementation of several)
reverse-engineering of the NTFS filesystem
format by Linux coders, that
was reliable
enough to permit mounting that filesystem and blanking
out
local system account passwords in the
SAM -- which was then used by a
couple of
generations of thankful NT admins who'd forgotten or
lost the
Administrator password.
When Microsoft Corporation was
then mocked by people claiming the Linux
community had cracked their security and that
the latter was defective,
I and others were
very quick to say 'No, not at all. The only thing
defective was the erroneous claim that it's
reasonable to think physical
security
doesn't matter. It's actually of paramount
importance.'
--
Cheers, « Il
n'est si homme de bien, qu'il mette à
l'examen
Rick Moen
des loi toutes ses actions et pensées, qui ne
soit
rick-at-linuxmafia.com pendable
dix fois en sa vie. »
McQ! (4x80)
-- Michel de
Montaigne, Essais
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