LABScon Replay | Breaking Firmware Trust From The Other Side: Exploiting Early Boot Phases (Pre-Efi)

Vulnerabilities in System Management Mode (SMM) and more general UEFI applications/drivers (DXE) are receiving increased attention from security researchers. Over the last 12 months, the Binarly efiXplorer team disclosed 107 high-impact vulnerabilities related to SMM and DXE firmware components.

However, newer platforms have significantly increased the runtime mitigations in the UEFI firmware execution environment (including SMM), and the new Intel platform firmware runtime mitigations reshaped the attack surface for SMM/DXE with new Intel Hardware Shield technologies applied below-the-OS.

The complexity …

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