On 26-Mar-08, at 3:18 PM, Lonnie Smetana wrote:

Tool makes mincemeat of Windows passwords By Dan Goodin in San Francisco Published Tuesday 4th March 2008 23:57 GMT

A security researcher has released an easy-to-use tool that accesses locked Windows computers in seconds without entering a password.

The tool, which was released Tuesday by Adam Boileau, works by connecting a Linux machine to the Firewire port of the target PC and modifying the password protection that's stored in local memory.

The attack exploits a well-known weakness in Firewire that makes it easy for connected devices to read and write to the memory of the host machine. Similar hacks work on machines running OS X and Linux (see here (http://www.matasano.com/log/695/windows-remote-memory-access-though-firewire...) ). [...]

...from: http://rentzsch.com/macosx/securingFirewire

Friday, November 12, 2004 "The only evidence I have seen of the 'fix' [for the Firewire hack] was in Darwin's source-code - ie, nothing official from Apple. It first appeared in IOFireWireFamily v122.4.2 (Darwin v6.2/Mac OS X 10.2.2) which was released November 2002. That was obviously a few months after MacHax Best Hack Contest 2002 where [the Firewire/DMA exploit won first prize.]"

- - - - - - In addition, Apple's technical people suggest, if you wish more protection against any RAM exploits under OS X that you "Use secure virtual memory". They've said that this will protect not only application memory but also the actual OS areas where password exploits would most probably be aimed.

How to enable "Use secure virtual memory": - from the Apple

menu, select "System Preferences..." - click on

(Security) and choose the General tab

if necessary - ensure there is a check mark next to "Use secure virtual memory"

I've been running this for a while now without any problems and there does not appear to be any performance hit either.

Finally, I've done a little bit of looking for similar protections for LINUX and Windows. Will post if I stumble across them.

Wayne