Posted May 6th, 2008 by admin
NASA Tech Briefs INSIDER 05/06/2008
This week’s question concerns the possibility of hackers infecting computers through their hardware. Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign recently demonstrated that they could gain control of a computer by adding malicious circuits to a field-programmable gate array emulating the Leon 3 open source processor. When they hooked the FPGA up to another computer, they were able to steal passwords stored in its memory and install malicious software that would gain control of the computer’s operating system. Although malicious hardware is considered more difficult to install than a software virus, some scientists worry that increasing chip complexity will make it easier for hackers to infiltrate computers. What do you think? Are computers vulnerable to attacks by hardware hackers? Yes or no?
Vote here.
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on Tuesday, May 6th, 2008 at 3:42 pm and is filed under Insider.
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May 6th, 2008 at 4:52 pm
Short answer - of course. This is one excellent reason not to buy add-on boards from a source you don’t trust. Most large companies are more likely to test for and understand the liability for selling infected software and hardware.
May 6th, 2008 at 6:05 pm
Follow the money. One little hardware change to a chip, and our hacker can steal miwwyuns.
May 6th, 2008 at 7:54 pm
Short answer, yes. If a human built it, another human can infiltrate it. I like Brian West’s reply as to purchasing things for your PC.
May 9th, 2008 at 9:04 pm
I’m sure it’s already happening every time one takes their box to the geek squad or the local shop for unscrambling, or plugs-in that jump drive. They already borrow any expensive software you have loaded & share it with buddies. Live with it.