> No, I think this shows that adding customisability features to please a small minority of users into low level components can be a huge security risk
Customization of the POST boot logo image should be as simple as burning an image to a simple flash ROM which remains untrusted and data-only (no-execute) - the fact that performing these ostensibly harmless customizations will introduce a security issue just leads me to believe an intelligence agency is involved somehow...
I mean, it makes sense: one can probably convince the leaders of Hamas or Cuba that it's worthwhile to let the 14yo great nephew twice-removed of an inner party cadre member to replace their laptop's capitalistic imagery from ASUS/Acer/Razer/Dell with some JPEG with far more revolutionary appeal - they'd never suspect a thing...
> the fact that performing these ostensibly harmless customizations will introduce a security issue just leads me to believe an intelligence agency is involved somehow...
This is definitely the kind of thing intelligence agencies look for but considering the half century of C programmers utterly failing at decoding files safely makes me highly skeptical that anyone needed to compromise all of these vendors.
Also, the Hamas thing is a bit of a tangent but given that Israel had over a year’s advance notice I suspect that elite hacking is not a prerequisite.
It is as simple as burning an image into ROM for many devices, that's the entire problem. As it turns out, UEFI vendors and secure programming don't seem to mix well, and this easy customisation option turned into a major infection vector.
If you think compact C file parsing libraries containing vulnerabilities are some kind of conspiracy by intelligence agencies, I've got bad news for you about almost every operating system out there.
Hopefully in the future vendors will pick up languages like Rust with better memory management security (though any programming language can contain vulnerabilities, of course), at least for critical components like UEFI firmware, but as long as the current code bases are used, we'll have parsing bugs. These firmwares have over a decade of legacy at this point, and if they haven't bothered fuzzing up to now, I doubt they will do in the future, let alone rewrite their parsers to be safer.
Customization of the POST boot logo image should be as simple as burning an image to a simple flash ROM which remains untrusted and data-only (no-execute) - the fact that performing these ostensibly harmless customizations will introduce a security issue just leads me to believe an intelligence agency is involved somehow...
I mean, it makes sense: one can probably convince the leaders of Hamas or Cuba that it's worthwhile to let the 14yo great nephew twice-removed of an inner party cadre member to replace their laptop's capitalistic imagery from ASUS/Acer/Razer/Dell with some JPEG with far more revolutionary appeal - they'd never suspect a thing...