ACM / IEEE Computer Society: "If You Trust Your Computer, You’re Crazy"

The Princeton ACM / IEEE Computer Society Joint Chapter is delighted to host:

Google Software Engineer Ron Minnich, presenting:

** If You Trust Your Computer, You’re Crazy **

There are potential security issues in your computer’s UEFI firmware. What can we do about it?

In 2017, we learned from the WikiLeaks release of the vault7 material that the security of the UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) firmware used in most PCs and laptops is once again a concern. UEFI is a proprietary and closed-source operating system, with a codebase almost as large as the Linux kernel. The UEFI firmware code runs when the system is powered on and continues to run after it boots the OS (hence its designation as a “Ring -2 hypervisor”). It is a great place to hide security exploits – the firmware never stops running and any exploits are undetectable by kernels and programs.

Google’s answer to this is NERF (Non-Extensible Reduced Firmware), an open source software system developed at Google to replace almost all of the UEFI firmware with a tiny Linux kernel and initial in-memory file system (initramfs). The initramfs file system contains an init and command line utilities from the u-root project (http://u-root.tk/), which are written in the Go language.

Ron Minnich is a Software Engineer at Google. He has contributed to many open source projects in the last several decades, including the Linux kernel (9p file system); the FreeBSD kernel (rfork); and Plan 9 (many different areas). He directed the team that ported Plan 9 to the Blue Gene supercomputers. He invented LinuxBIOS (now called coreboot) in 1999. He is one of the core contributors to the Harvey operating system. Ron’s most recent Linux Foundation talk was on “How to build your own signed version of ChromeOS and resign your Chromebook with your personal keys” in 2016.

Date: Thursday April 19, 2018, 8:00pm
(refreshments at 7:30pm)
Place: Small Auditorium, Room CS 105
Computer Science Building, Princeton University
35 Olden St., Princeton NJ
Information: Dennis Mancl princetonacm {at} gmail {dot} org
On-line meeting notice: http://PrincetonACM.acm.org/meetings/mtg1804.pdf

All ACM / IEEE-CS meetings are open to the public. Students and their parents are welcome. There is no admission charge.

Evening parking is usually available in Princeton University Lot 10, off of William Street. Obey all posted regulations. On-street parking is available on William, Olden, and Prospect Streets; meter enforcement ends at either 6:00 or 7:00. Check posted signs.

A pre-meeting dinner with the speaker is held at 6:00 p.m. at Ruby Tuesday's Restaurant on Route 1. Please send email to princetonacm {at} gmail {dot} org in advance if you plan to attend the dinner.