Scope of ThinkPwn UEFI Zero Day Expands

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Lenovo bad coding for their ThinkPad's and some HP laptops but the vulnerability is affecting many more it is found.

 

Excerpt:

 

"A serious hardware vulnerability, thought to be confined to UEFI drivers in Lenovo and HP laptops, has also been found in firmware running on motherboards sold by Gigabyte.

 

The flaw was publicly disclosed last week by researcher Dmytro Oleksiuk. No patches are yet available.

 

Oleksiuk said the flaw, which he calls ThinkPwn, is in the SystemSmmRuntimeRt UEFI driver, which he found on firmware in Lenovo ThinkPad laptops.

 

“Vulnerability is present in all of the ThinkPad series laptops, the oldest one that I have checked is X220 and the newest one is T450s (with latest firmware versions available at this moment),” Oleksiuk wrote on a Github entry. Oleksiuk published proof-of-concept exploit code for the vulnerability last week along with his disclosure.

 

An attacker exploiting the vulnerability will gain privileges that will allow them to run arbitrary code in System Management mode and potentially disable flash write protection which defends against code execution. An attacker would also be able to shut down other security protections such as Secure Boot or bypass Virtual Secure Mode, including Credential Guard, on Windows 10 machines.

 

Lenovo responded last week that its investigation is ongoing and that the vulnerable System Management Mode code was written by Intel and came to Lenovo from one of its BIOS vendors; these suppliers take original chip code from Intel and AMD and customize them to work with specific computers."

 

More tech details in the article here: https://threatpost.com/scope-of-thinkpwn-uefi-zero-day-expands/119027/