
Hacker Shows Us How to Unlock a Laptop Using an NSA Tool [video] - n3mes1s
https://motherboard.vice.com/read/hacker-unlock-a-laptop-nsa-tool-slotscreamer
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pritambaral
They exploit Thunderbolt, whose insecure "All your memory are belong to us"
model is known. I wonder what the attackers would use on a non-Thunderbolt
laptop (say, a ThinkPad, or a regular Dell/HP/What-Have-You).

Of course, using an Apple laptop to demo this makes a lot of sense: they are
popular, almost ubiquitous, and they provide an external vector to full,
direct memory access. But I don't think the scare factor holds up on a non-
Apple device.

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Avery3R
Most laptops which don't have thunderbolt ports have a pci express card slot
that's also vulnerable to DMA attacks.

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pritambaral
Do you mean ExpressCard? I don't think I've seen a single laptop with an
external PCIe slot.

Even so, neither ExpressCard or internal PCIe are used for generic, everyday
connectivity (like projectors / external screens). Thunderbolt on Apple
laptops is marketed to be used for those.

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dogma1138
If you have physical access it's game over.

FireWire had this issue, so did express card, heck even if you don't have TB,
express card or any other PCIe external interface.

Open the laptop and either find an empty microPCIe slot or pull out the
wireless card there is some risk of a BSOD but it works in many cases and
voila you have DMA.

That said bot Intel and AMD do have ways of encrypting memory regions which
can prevent DMA attacks.

Windows 10 has DMA port protection which enables the OS to restrict DMA access
from external ports this is available from build 1507 but I'm not sure if it's
enabled by default.

Edit: looks like this is enabled by default when Bitlocker is enabled on
recent builds.

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n3mes1s
some links related:

\-
[https://www.defcon.org/images/defcon-22/dc-22-presentations/...](https://www.defcon.org/images/defcon-22/dc-22-presentations/Fitzpatrick-
Crabill/DEFCON-22-Joe-FitzPatrick-Miles-Crabill-NSA-Playset-PCIe.pdf)

\-
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OD2Wxe4RLeU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OD2Wxe4RLeU)

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iask
Cool. I want that for Christmas.

