by Fnord666 on (#4YRRB)
canopic jug writes:DMA attacks have never really gone out of fashion and, contrary to popular belief, do not necessarily require physical access. DMA is a misfeature designed provide peripherals with direct, unconstrained, high-speed read-write access to the whole of a system's RAM. Firewire (IEEE-1394) and Thunderbolt are two of the more infamous avenues for attacks, but network cards and other peripherals can also have this capability. One example of abuse would for the peripheral to read and exfiltrate private encryption keys as they rest in memory.