Re: Combining Hurd and Qubes OS for security reasons? Possible?

The ACPI system is a subsystem of the BIOS, which itself is patchable
firmware. I would never exclude the chance that ACPI code could get
executed, no matter which OS one is using actually - There are also PCI
devices containing (patchable) firmware etc.

Unless one would be using an open-hardware/openBIOS based system, I don't
think that security could be achieved on modern (x64) hardware with all its
patchable firmware components. You can only 'limit the attack surface'
otherwise - That approach might work or not. I'm certainly not a fan of
Shuttleworth, but in my opinion he summarizes this whole issue quite well:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Configuration_and_Power_Interface#Security_risks

As far as I know, the Raspberry PI does not contain any hardware component,
whose firmware could be 'patched' without having physical access to it, so
maybe that would be a starting point (or any other system, where this is
applicable).

Then you would still have to deal with software based exploits, but at
least one could fix those once having detected them. But if your system
contains hardware with 'patched' firmware, this would be far more difficult
if not even impossible.


On Tue, Dec 22, 2015 at 4:59 PM, Richard Braun <[email protected]> wrote:

> On Sat, Dec 19, 2015 at 11:28:43PM +0100, Samuel Thibault wrote:
> > It will most probably be resistent to windows- and linux-oriented
> > rootkits, since the implementation is different.  If there are flaws in
> > the ACPI implementation of GNU Mach, there are probably ways to rootkit
> > it.  GNU Mach however currently uses ACPI only for shutting the system
> > down, so the exposure is low.  We'd however need it to eventually work
> > with multicore processors.
>
> The only part of ACPI really needed for SMP is the table that replaces
> the MP Spec. See X15 [1] for an example. I highly doubt it would lead to
> code execution. Those blobs mostly come from non architectural devices.
>
> --
> Richard Braun
>
> [1]
> http://git.sceen.net/rbraun/x15.git/blob/HEAD:/arch/x86/machine/acpimp.c
>