We desperately need to get rid of big tech. It's all trash. Of course some standard made by corporate types is going to be shiftily made enough to have a buffer overflow
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Does this one have any piracy implications? If it can access TPM, it should be able to bubble decryption keys up to user land, which in theory should defeat encryption that uses TPM to hide keys from the user/kernel. Might also defeat denuvo.
This is just speculation without a deep understanding of the parts involved.
That's not how that works. If they shipped private keys they would have been leaked by now
The whole point of TPM is to enable passing keys so users can still view content (which needs to be decrypted to be shown at all) without being able to access the keys themselves (because it has its own public/private keys and the keys are encrypted using the public keys and the private ones aren't supposed to be visible outside of TPM).
If this exploit gives access to TPM and its private key, then you can use that to decrypt keys as they are sent and then decrypt a copy of the content that gets saved as such (instead of immediately re-encrypted with your monitor's public key so you can't just intercept the signal on the wire, which is also why HDMI has been unwilling to license an open source implementation because those details could reveal flaws and just one flaw could mean all media up to this point is now piratable without an insider leaking anything).
I have a motherboard with a botched bios I can’t restore stuck in a boot loop over secure boot issues. I can’t even reach the bios config screen to clear it out or reflash. I wonder if this would rescue it.
The parties that discovered CVE-2026-97631—Alex Matrosov of Anthropic and Dan Holmes-Mitra of Google—had arranged for it to stay under wraps until a coordinated disclosure that was scheduled for January. AMI, a maker of motherboards and other hardware, published this pull request last month that detailed the vulnerability and included a code fix. Once the post came to the attention of the discovering parties, TianoCore Project members published a public advisory last week.
Dear OpenAI: This is responsible disclosure. Please take note as to not ruin peoples weekends so you can say "look what our API did!"
These are all the US and Chinese backdoors being finally discovered and everyone is in a panic when they should be celebrating lol Good. Bring the corporate internet down, it was better when it wasn't full of normies and post-iPhone users anyway. When the demographics skewed technical and not performative. And bring the banks down too please. I literally don't give one shit if the world burns because it'll burn cooler than this hell we're already subjected to. For once, we have a chance to enact change that isn't "just vote lmaoo i'm so smart! i'm radical chic!" so bring it on
"The vulnerability, with a severity rating of 9.5 out of 10, resides in the TianoCore EDK II, an open source codebase..."
I still remember the geek vs nerd facebook quiz. Gosh I forgot how iphone ushered this era of enshittification. Although, having super AI focused with the few, not sure this is a better future. Even the unabomber wrote about this.
Never wanted to uppercut somebody so bad as in 2005 when they purchased an iphone, then declared to me and everyone in earshot what a techie they are. This is a person for whom I had to uninstall incredimail almost daily, and thought that the way to send an email was to open Word, import the thing into a document then click File then click Send as Email.
So am I correct in understanding that this could be used to make a tool to unlock any encrypted disk that relies on the tpm whilst something like luks or indeed any solution that doesn't rely on the bios being secure would be fine.
Note I'm talking about a stolen laptop not an evil maid situation.
Not necessarily. Luks can be used with TPM. Although I've never seen it in practice.
Most Linux distros offer a standard Luks with passphrase setup with just a single checkmark, but enabling TPM takes more work.
Sounds like luks is borked as well if youre using only tpm state to unlock, which you shouldnt
CVE-2026-97631 doesn’t affect home and small office users, or any other users who boot their devices solely from disk drives. Instead, it applies only to organizations with machines that boot from local networks, or conceivably from Internet-connected resources.
In the PXE boot code. Very low risk for the vast majority of people.
You also need to have sufficiently infiltrated the target's local network to masquerade as a PXE server, and be in a position to force a server to reboot / just wait for one to reboot. Yes, a few places have large, fairly open networks with a lot of devices configure to PXE boot and they should apply the update before the next reboot, but vast majority of people, no issue at all.
If a hacker can get PXE boot working reliably I’d hire them
It's how I installed Arch btw on my desktop, tiny boot image basically downloads the installer into RAM - NetBoot.
But yeah, if you've got a computer that's old enough to be fully supported yet new enough to have the UEFI for hardware, an ethernet network which is robust enough to download full system images on every restart yet simple enough for the firmware to understand, and tonnes of memory free to hold the whole OS at all times, and you can tolerate the fact that restarts take ages, then it works great.
Reminds me of the old adage: How do you figure out if someone is an Arch user… 😁
FELLOW INVDERS OF THE GLORIOUS PERPETUAL LEIGION OF CALAMITY OF THE NINTH ETERNAL GLACTIC EMPIRE MAY REJOICE FOR THE HEADLINE CONFIRMS THAT OUR MIGHTY THOUGHTCUBES AND CALCULAMATORS ARE UNAFFECTED AS THEY ARE PRODUCTS OF THE PLANET ZILZOG
any humans reading this you're crazy why are you so crazy
The parties that discovered CVE-2026-97631—Alex Matrosov of Anthropic and Dan Holmes of Google—had arranged for it to stay under wraps until a coordinated disclosure that was scheduled for January. AMI, a maker of motherboards and other hardware, published this pull request last month that detailed the vulnerability and included a code fix. Once the post came to the attention of the discovering parties, TianoCore Project members published a public advisory last week.
Hot take: botched disclosures like this should open a company to criminal liability. We need to start treating SWE with the same level of scrutiny we do other engineering fields and not "oopsie poopsie, I accidentally just disclosed an attack that endangers global infrastructure."
Edit: Also, just of fucking course it's a buffer overflow in C code. "No way to prevent this, says only nation where this regularly happens" vibes.
So I posted this quote as well but for a different reason. Google and Anthropic chose responsible disclosure, unlike OpenAI with the lovely weekend fiasco for PR.
In this one, AMI made a mistake. I don't think making a mistake should be punishable to the extent that ignoring responsible disclosure should. Some dev pushed a PR out of habit, sucks but I'll take the last minute patch requirement on that. Some business lead once to see if they can push the stock? No thanks.
I've been advocating for years that international legislation needs to be put in place to enforce responsible disclosure practices.
That is indeed a hot take. The cve involves crafting a PXE packet, so just.... Don't use PXE in your environment.
If you do, you already know of the dangers of signing exploits in boot images, DNS shenanigans, and all that.
I'm not saying this isn't serious, but it's not really the end of the world.
Whew, at least my severs on planet Saturn are okay
Saturn is currently about 1 light hour from Earth. That's a hell of a ping.
But what about all the other planets?
Ok so just don’t turn computers on anymore. Got it 👍
And touch grass like some kind of freak?? You’ll have to fight me 🔪
Legacy bios ftw
This one appears to be sensationalist, but seeing bugs coming out of the woodwork in every layer of the stack makes you realize how vulnerable our giant tech stack is and always was. I think it's time to hit reset and nuke the stack. Surely there is a way to create a low level, generic execution environment that doesn't rely on this bloated ass stack. I don't see why an application's entire stack could not be auditable down to the machine instructions. Then, we wouldn't all need access to super computers like today.
Neat. So are legacy BIOS actually more secure at the moment? Weird to think about but very reminiscent of that one time almost every Gigabyte™ brand mobo had an exploit tied to its online update capability.
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