Re: Meet “badBIOS,” the mysterious Mac and PC malware that jumps airgaps

[Jim Bell]

________________________________
 From: coderman <coderman at gmail.com>


>> It has been about 31 years since I worked at Intel; at the time they were
>> developing the first DRAMs with 'redundancy':  The ability to swap out
>> 'rows' and 'columns', or potentially blocks, of storage elements.   This was
>> done to be able to drastically increase the yield of such chips:   Test
>> programs were written to identify errors (single bits; bad rows; bad
>> columns; bad blocks) and swap out with 'invisible' rows/columns/blocks with
>> others.  Presumably, modern flash ROM has long used similar abilities.  If
>> that is the case, there is some kind of ordinarily-invisible storage areas
>> (blocks, most likely) in those flash-drives.  Such areas were sometimes
>> 'activated' (made to appear/disappear) by out-of-spec voltages (above +5
>> volts), but it's possible also that reading or 'writing' combinations of
>> pre-specified data would also do this.  It's been too long for me to give
>> detailed assistance, but I can well imagine that 'they' are taking advantage
>> of such 'features'.


>Intel would be a strange beast for you today Jim.

When I started work at Intel in early July 1980, Intel was somewhat of a backwater of the semiconductor manufacturing companies.  It had about 15,000 employees, and it was best known for EPROMs, high-speed static RAMs, and 5-volt-only DRAMs.  (I was hired as a product engineer for a 'pseudostatic' (self-refreshing DRAM) labelled the 2186 (8K by 8), which had fuse-driven redundancy).   It was about this time that the 8088 microprocessor was chosen by IBM to run their IBM PC (A big mistake:  I thought the 8086/88 and its 'segmentation' sucked, especially with its puny 64 kilobyte segments, and worse, a 12-bit overlap between the address register and the segment register, limiting the address to 1 megabytes), but the boost to business would not arrive until late 1981 or so.  And worse, the 8088, with its 8-bit data bus, was little faster than a Z-80 microprocessor.  It's not that choosing the 8086 would have been vastly better, but at least that would
 have smoothed the transition to 80286 that was done with the IBM AT, since the bus would already have been 16-bit wide.

>there's a secret underground facility in Oregon (perhaps Cali too) for
>classified intelligence work.  some small fraction of Intel employees
>even know it exists. (maybe i'll post GPS coords?)

I never heard of it.  But if I knew the GPS, maybe I'd visit...  Maybe that's what they did with the set for 'Goonies'.

>there they sequester CPU vulnerability research of sufficient
>implication.  there they sequester hardware level exploitation
>research of sufficient implication. there they work on TS/SCI
>compartmented projects for USGOV.


>these people do not have your best interests at heart!

I wouldn't be surprised!
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