this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2024
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Privacy
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I'm admittedly not as knowledgeable about it as I'd like, but I also have a similar system. A primary encrypted Linux partition wuth a dualboot into Windows for times I absolutely need to go into it (which admittedly has been coming up less and less).
What I tell myself is that, sure, in the best case that everything works as I'd like, the rootkit can never bleed into the Linux side of stuff, and I'm really only ever at risk when I'm actively on the Windows, and even then if Riot remains a good citizen, nothing will happen. It's an (increasingly) small window of vulnerability.
Thing is, I've seen complete systems go down because of "small windows of vulnerabilities" before. Catastrophic failures, more times than I'd have liked. Who knows, maybe someday someone manages to exploit that window and use it to, for example, piggyback into your home network and access your devices. I dunno, call me paranoid.
In my head, installing something like a kernel anticheat is really not worth it. It's a huge over reach of privilege for so little gain for the user. And frankly, I don't trust Riot to be a good citizen with that much privilege on my machine.
Also note that even a dual boot system is leaky. A kernel level anticheat has enough power to do firmware upgrades on peripherals or the UEFI, so a badly behaving kernel level anticheat could easily take over your entire system in a way that can never be gotten rid of.
Anything kernel level can theoretically modify anything in your TPM too, so Linux programs that use it (admittedly I'm not sure any user program use it) could be manipulated in weird ways
In what ways? The worst it could do to the TPM directly is invalidate your secure boot unless I'm missing something.
for me that's enough of an inconvenience to wash my hands of the whole dual-booting scenario.
Interesting. It's weird that a kernel level program can upgrade UEFI. We run a lot of closed source kernel level stuff already. Do you have any links for further reading?
There definitely is upgrading of UEFI/disk firmware from a running Windows. So if Windows can...
Isn't that terrifying, and rather telling? Effing Windows can edit UEFI...
Realistically a good starting point to read up on could be about admin privileges. Or ring 0 in software. It basically boils down to the fact that anything that is running as root ( or with admin privileges) can read and write to ANY file it wants to. Effectively having full control over the system.
In other words it could be used to do anything they want with your pc. An example of that actually happening is the anti Cheat that genshin impact is using because that was exploited in that way already.
I know about ring 0, I just assumed UEFI would be off the disk and inaccessible to any software.
UEFI is off disk, but it is writeable to some degree.
Recently there was a story about a hack exploiting the ability to write boot images (as in vendor screens that display during boot).
There's also the ability to store executable code that runs even if the system doesn't have an OS - this is ostensibly used for theft prevention solutions. Just imagine how that can be abused.
UEFI is a ******* problem. I've never liked it. I get why it exists, but it's design was intentionally borked to push DRM-like control, under the guise of offering increased security. Yet we have that boot code that can be executed silently.
It would be nice to see the 80's BIOS wars again, with an open-source UEFI organization this time.
Do you have some further reading on the active exploit of Genshin Impact's anti-cheat?