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Originally Posted by Fish
And if you have direct access to a computer in the first place, there are much much better ways to get what you want from that computer without using goofy-named hypothetical tinker toys attached to the cabling.
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Thats the difference between monitoring/keylogging vs getting what is already in the machine (what is typed and seen might not be in there).
Quote:
Originally Posted by Fish
Yeah...... these idiots have no clue what they're talking about. I've constructed I2C boards that can read computer sensor information in various ways. It's moronic to say an I2C bus could hack a PC, unless you consider getting the current fan speed of the CPU fan as "Hacking".
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It sounds like they say that i2c is a path that malware can travel from their bug to execution (either gpu or something else). The bugs described are about monitoring/keylogging from hardware without modifying the software environment.
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Originally Posted by anon
Display connectors use i2c for the EDID information. VGA, DVI, and maybe HDMI have an i2c interface in them. According to the article their "bug" attaches to the i2c. The i2c bus is likely not isolated from everything else. VGA i2c bus likely originates in the GPU display controller. That doesn't mean NSA backdoor software can't open a side interface on it.
You can use i2c-tools on Linux to poke around your system's i2c busses if you're trying to find out more. I'm fairly certain RAM also uses i2c, each RAM module has a little i2c EEPROM on it that stores timing and configuration data for the module and those busses are accessible with i2c-tools as well
One fairly prominent use is with serial presence detect in DDR SDRAM, which allows the reading of an EEPROM on the DIMM containing the necessary information to set up the memory controller to access the RAM. I.e., this is done by the processor before it can use its RAM.
In fact, I would go so far as to say this is the perfect exemplar of the niche I2C inhabits.
I2C will be used in multiple separate buses; one or two are routed through external connectors.
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