Here is my little thread about Lightning video adapters – also known as Haywire – which are actually computers that feature Apple Secure Boot and run Darwin kernel pic.twitter.com/Vl5S0McWKX

— john (@nyan_satan) July 27, 2019

Click on the above Twitter URL for a thread with a teardown of Apple Lightning video adapters.

Slightly more info:
https://www.theiphonewiki.com/wiki/Haywire
https://panic.com/blog/the-lightning-digital-av-adapter-surprise/
https://www.apple.com/ca/shop/campaigns/lightning-connector
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20544564 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5307781

Leif of Linaro posted a message with a bit of background on — and some patches for — GRUB on ARM, including the latest 2.04 release:

Spoiler alert, prepare a cup of coffee:

[...]Anyway, if you got this far, have (another) cup of coffee.

See-also: https://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/grub/grub.html
http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/grub.git/

The July monthly release of FWTS (FirmWare Test Suite) is out, with multiple Intel MSR register tests, an ACPICA update. Hmm, all the URLs from the announcement are HTTPS …except the source link is HTTP. 😦 And the binary link for FWTS-live is also HTTP.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FirmwareTestSuite/ReleaseNotes/19.07.00
https://lists.01.org/pipermail/luv/2019-July/003156.html
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/fwts
https://launchpad.net/~firmware-testing-team/+archive/ubuntu/ppa-fwts-stable
http://fwts.ubuntu.com/release/fwts-V19.07.00.tar.gz

http://fwts.ubuntu.com/fwts-live/fwts-live-19.07.00.img.xz

PUG: “Pug, the UEFI Guidedog”, or “the Programmer’s UEFI Guide”.
A front-end to build the UEFI driver(s) from a sandbox package.

https://github.com/timotheuslin/PugPkg

[…]This release comes about 7 months after our last release.[…]

See the release notes for all the changes in this release:

https://lists.01.org/pipermail/luv/2019-July/003159.html

LUV is the Linux UEFI Validation project, a firmware (UEFI and BIOS) test distro for Intel UEFI/BIOS systems.

https://01.org/linux-uefi-validation

NVIDIA has released software security updates for NVIDIA® Jetson™ TX1 in the NVIDIA® Tegra® Linux Driver Package (L4T). The update addresses issues that may lead to code execution, denial of service, or escalation of privileges. To protect your system, download available updates from NVIDIA DevZone.[…]

https://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/4835

https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2019-5680

https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2019-5680

This is an untethered coldboot exploit and as far as i can tell it affects every single Tegra device released so far. (Except the Nintendo Switch since it uses a custom bootloader.) Completely defeats secure boot even on latest firmware.[…]

https://github.com/balika011/selfblow

It is finally official. We have finished and released KernelShark 1.0. It’s a completely new rewrite in Qt from the older KernelShark that was written in GTK. It’s faster, it’s more extensible, and easier to use.[…]

http://www.kernelshark.org

By: Fermín J. Serna
July 24, 2019

This post is about 13 remote-code-execution vulnerabilities in the U-Boot boot loader, which I found with my colleagues Pavel Avgustinov and Kevin Backhouse. The vulnerabilities can be triggered when U-Boot is configured to use the network for fetching the next stage boot resources. Please note that the vulnerability is not yet patched at https://gitlab.denx.de/u-boot/u-boot, and that I am making these vulnerabilities public at the request of U-Boot’s master custodian Tom Rini. For more information, check the timeline below.[…]

https://blog.semmle.com/uboot-rce-nfs-vulnerability/

Coreboot’s Google Summer of Code continues, with 2 students this Summer, with some Coverity fixes and UEFI improvements!

[GSoC] Ghidra firmware utilities, week 9 https://t.co/VciJn188Lm

— vincent zimmer (@vincentzimmer) July 24, 2019

[GSoC] Ghidra firmware utilities, weeks 6-8
https://blogs.coreboot.org/blog/2019/07/17/gsoc-ghidra-firmware-utilities-weeks-6-8/

[GSoC] Ghidra firmware utilities, week 9
https://blogs.coreboot.org/blog/2019/07/24/4743/

[GSoC] Coreboot Coverity, weeks 5-7
https://blogs.coreboot.org/blog/2019/07/16/gsoc-coreboot-coverity-weeks-5-7/

Nikolaj stopped working on UEFITool when he joined Apple, because Apple apparently wouldn’t allow employees to work on open source projects. There’s been a change for the better:

It took us some serious time, but I've finally got all required official approvals to continue working on UEFITool, huge props to @radian for making that happen.
My first commit since 2016, adding ME region parser and extended ucode header parser: https://t.co/yXNJTFtCCt

— Nikolaj Schlej (@NikolajSchlej) July 24, 2019

If you haven’t looked at UEFITool yet, it is definately worth a look:

https://github.com/LongSoft/UEFITool

A macOS app for Hackintoshes that will generate a pre-defined OpenCore EFI folder based off user selection of varies items.

https://github.com/Pavo-IM/Aeon

Note: project includes some binary-only .EFI files without source code.

[…]In nearly 8 months since 4.9 we had 198 authors commit 2538 changes to master. Of these, 85 authors made their first commit to coreboot[…] the tree grew by about 11000 lines of code plus 5000 lines of comments.[…]Added 28 mainboards[…]

See the below announcement for more details. Luckily, the coreboot project is pretty good at giving an overview of the changes for each release:

Announcing coreboot 4.10

https://mail.coreboot.org/hyperkitty/list/coreboot@coreboot.org/thread/CHJ5JGGP4YKJAAFTXYAZAIRSQXHFEMBO/

InfinityHook sample is live, please consult the readme. Massive kudos to @0xNemi for incredible code clean-up. Microsoft says this is not security issue, have fun.https://t.co/a0cUu4zvrA

— Nick Peterson 🇺🇲 (@nickeverdox) July 19, 2019

https://github.com/everdox/InfinityHook

Rembember the suspected USGov backdoor into OpenBSD’s IPsec from around 2000? Here’s some more FOIA’d information on it, see multiple messages in this Twitter thread:

https://twitter.com/RooneyMcNibNug/status/1152327783055601664

https://www.muckrock.com/foi/united-states-of-america-10/foia-fbi-openbsd-70084/

Click to access FBI_OpenBSD_response_OCRd.pdf

A new Redfish command line tool, written in Rust:

https://github.com/joyent/redfish-util

An overview of existing approaches to USB fuzzing: https://t.co/PB3xP3CN0R

— Andrey Konovalov (@andreyknvl) July 18, 2019

Syzkaller starts to support USB fuzzing recently and has already found over 80 bugs within the Linux kernel. Almost every fuzzing expert whom I talked to has started to apply their fuzzing techniques to USB because of the high-security impact and potential volume of vulnerabilities due to the complexity of USB itself. While this post is NOT about fuzzing or USB security in general, I hope to provide some insights for USB fuzzing in general as someone who has been doing research on USB security for a while.[…]

USB Fuzzing: A USB Perspective

Technical overview of Windows 10's "Trusted Platform
Module and Unified Extensible Firmware Interface 'Secure Boot'”, via @certbund https://t.co/0ECapk3yoj [PDF] pic.twitter.com/pim4zsnpBY

— Enno Rey (@Enno_Insinuator) July 17, 2019

https://www.bsi.bund.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/DE/BSI/Cyber-Sicherheit/SiSyPHus/Workpackage5_TPM-Nutzung.pdf?__blob=publicationFile&v=2

Check out @xoreaxeaxeax’s latest article via @helpnetsecurity to learn how industry efforts like @IntelSecurity’s Excite project, @CHIPSEC and #HBFA are improving #UEFI #security https://t.co/Rgwtoh8Fth

— Maggie (@_m46s) July 17, 2019

The importance of hardening firmware security https://t.co/CFg12EDZI2 has nice mentions of chipsec https://t.co/KPyWKqzNCP HBFA https://t.co/b5puvKBwYW and Excite https://t.co/uaOc2mQ3a4

— vincent zimmer (@vincentzimmer) July 17, 2019

The importance of hardening firmware security

The importance of hardening firmware security