I was helping a friend replacing the battery and thermal paste on his System 76 laptop. Never own one before but I notice it runs a special BIOS version, Coreboot. It turns out there are Coreboot and Lireboot. .These help to boot really fast though.
Anyway, I notice there are no password BIOS lock like on Lenovo. How would this protect against someone plug a USB in and just wipe my drive? On Lenovo you can set a supervisor / boot passwords, and you can remove USB drives from the boot list.
In the best possible scenario, a BIOS/UEFI password lock will prevent an adversary from using the computer as-is. If the adversary has an objective to quickly fence the computer, then this objective is foiled. Note that preventing the computer from physical access would also foil this objective, since that prevents the adversary from even accessing the machine.
But that’s the best case. In a more-worse case scenario, the adversary wants to steal data from the computer. A firmware password will be useless if the adversary removes the HDD or SSD from the machine. This is, instead, correctly solved with drive-level encryption, using a password or smart card to unlock.
The reason why open-source firmwares (BIOS/UEFI) might be uninterested in implementing a password is because: 1) preventing physical access is more effective, and 2) because it’s arguably a form of security theatre: commercial firmware vendors include a password feature because some customer once asked for it, but not with security as a well-thought objective. Open-source projects have a habit of not implementing pointless features.
TL;DR: physical access to a machine is fatal to any and all security protections
Good question. But if someone unauthorized has physical access to your system, you already have worse problems to worry about…
Yeah, I’ve never even thought about using PW BIOS protection since someone could always just pop out the drive and do whatever with it. I guess if it’s a soldered drive it makes slightly more sense but still easily overcome by anyone who’s determined enough
Full disk encryption is what you want really
It’s apparently not at all a priority for the devs. They don’t seem to care if your laptop is stolen and the drive is wiped.
Data exfiltration was their only concern and drive encryption solves that.
What am I missing? If someone steals your laptop they can just mountb the drive in their own hardware irrelevant of your bios.
When the drive in encrypted, you need a (very very long) encryption key to read it. Otherwise, the data is obfuscated and can’t be read by bad actors. This encryption key is essentially impossible for (non-quantum) computers to crack as it would take too long
Even quantum computers will not be able to break AES fast enough
Ironically it’s also the best way to make sure your data isn’t leaked when selling drives second hand.
Full encrypt it, roll the key, and now you have a drive with no readable content for sale.
When the next person come along they will likely ignore the password and do their own thing.
Wouldn’t something like DBAN do the same thing but with less operations on the drive?
For spinning rust drives, yes. But for SSD no. Because of how the SSD store data it isn’t guaranteed to be overwritten.
That’s definitely true. In that case encrypting the SSD makes more sense yeah (or any flash storage)
Not if it’s encrypted.
They don’t seem to care if your laptop is stolen and the drive is wiped.
Even if they did care, what could they do about it? The thief could remove the drive and wipe it with their own computer, or even just physically destroy the thing. The only point of a BIOS password is to make the laptop a pain for a thief to resell.
I can pull and wipe the drive in any laptop in 1-10min. Even in high end corporate almost no one sets a BIOS password, the few that do are doing it more to keep users out of those settings than as security. And even if you set it the on a lenovo, dell, hp, etc… There’s usually a manufactur password or pins you can short to reset it.
Coreboot isn’t the same thing as the BIOS. It’s the motherboard chipset firmware and all it does is initialize the hardware, which is only part of what BIOS/UEFI do.
Check out something like Heads.
Anyway, wiping your drive is the least of your worries when it comes to software attacks. You should be keeping regular backups of your data anyway. You want to prevent malicious actors from accessing your data, which, if they have physical access to your hardware, increases the risk a great deal. Heads will help prevent against evil maid attacks, although the bad actor can still reflash the BIOS chip physically. Full disk encryption (assuming your computer is off at the time that your computer gets stolen/hijacked) is the goto method of securing the data on your SSD.
Maybe from another perspective, BIOS passwords are a weak defense. The BIOS settings storage are powered by a small battery and can be reset by removing the battery. As others have mentioned, protecting the data is the priority and done through encryption. Protecting the device itself is not really possible in most cases anyways.
