: Reducing the attack surface is critical. Platforms like DECAF perform "dynamic surgery" on UEFI binaries to remove unnecessary code without affecting performance, effectively hardening the firmware.
: Using Graphics aperture Direct Memory Access (DMA), attackers can sometimes bypass memory protections to perform live analysis of SMM code that should otherwise be isolated. Defending the Root of Trust Attacking and Defending BIOS
The battle over BIOS security is increasingly moving toward transparency. While proprietary vendors struggle with complex, legacy codebases, projects like Coreboot aim to replace opaque firmware with open-source alternatives that allow for community-driven security audits and faster patching of vulnerabilities. Attacking and Defending BIOS in 2015 - Recon.cx : Reducing the attack surface is critical
: When a system "wakes up" from sleep (S3 state), it relies on a boot script to restore hardware configurations. Researchers have demonstrated that if these scripts are stored in unprotected memory (ACPI NVS), an attacker with OS-level access can modify them to execute arbitrary code before the OS kernel even re-initializes. Defending the Root of Trust The battle over
Defending the BIOS requires a multi-layered "Chain of Trust" that begins at the hardware level.