Seattle-area SysAdmin firmware talk 9/10

What: Seattle Area SysAdmin Guild (SASAG) September Meeting
When: September 10, 2015, 19:00-21:00
Where: WTC-E 1st floor conference room (2211 Elliott Avenue, 6th Floor, 6S139, Seattle, WA 98121)
Why: Defending Intel UEFI systems from firmware attackers

In this talk, we’ll give an overview of the open source firmware security tools you can use to help detect ‘bootkits’, ‘firmworms’, and other firmware-level malware (as well as other defects and system failures), as well as some ideas how you might integrate firmware security into your long-term maintenance plan. Tools include: CHIPSEC, UEFITool, UEFI Firmware Parser, and some others discussed in this blog. (I’m not sure about the location, I think it’s the Washington Trade Center.) Unlike most talks on this topic, this talk will target system administrators, not security researchers.

https://github.com/chipsec/chipsec
https://github.com/LongSoft/UEFITool
https://github.com/theopolis/uefi-firmware-parser
http://sasag.org/

LinuxCon North America this August in Seattle

LinuxCon North America is happening this August, in Seattle for the first time (I think). A quick look at their schedule shows a variety of interesting presentations related to firmware security:

* Extending the Secure Boot Certificate and Signature Chain of Trust in the OS – Fionnuala Gunter, Hypori
* Resurrecting Internet Booting – Boot Boot, Booting Over the Internet – John Hawley, Intel
* Demystifying ACPI and EFI via Python and BITS – Josh Triplett
* ACPI for Network Switches – Dustin Byford, Cumulus Networks
* Tying TPMs Throughout The Stack – Matthew Garrett, CoreOS
* Turtles All The Way: Running Linux on Open Hardware – Rob Landley
* ACPI 6 and Linux – Rafael J. Wysocki, Intel
* The Bare-Metal Hypervisor as a Platform for Innovation – Russell Pavlicek, Citrix
* Suspend/Resume at the Speed of Light – Len Brown, Intel

Josh Triplett on BIOS BITS sounds especially interesting. It’ll be interesting to see if the boot boot reboot will get integrated with UEFI HTTP Boot support.

More information:
http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/linuxcon-north-america
http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/linuxcon-north-america/program/schedule