As more hardware vendors seek to implement the new NIST 800-155 specification that was designed to make the start-up BIOS firmware on our PCs and laptops more secure, they may need to rethink the security assumptions upon which the standard depends. A trio of researchers from The MITRE Corp. say that the current approach relies too heavily on access control mechanisms that can easily be bypassed.
The researchers are taking their message to Black Hat USA later this summer in a talk where they plan to unveil new malware proofs-of-concept that can trick an endpoint's Trusted Platform Module (TPM) chip into thinking the BIOS firmware is clean and can persist infecting the BIOS after it has been flashed, or reset, or even after it has been updated.
