Apple laptop batteries are the new attack vector

David Heath
Monday, 25 July 2011 03:15

Business IT - Security

Charlie Miller, a well-known security researcher in the Apple space, has found that your MacBook battery may-well be out to get you (if you don't get it first).

Charlie Miller, a winner at the last four Pwn2Own challenges has expanded our view of the Apple world yet again.

Well known for his off-the-wall challenges to the (relatively) flimsy Apple security wall, Miller has taken something of a left turn into even stranger territory.

A long time ago, this writer heard of a (hopefully) apocryphal tale of a system administrator who was struggling to locate the source of a security intrusion.  This administrator would reformat drives and the attack would continue; he would even replace the hard disk and it would continue, all the while with no connection to anything but electricity and oxygen.

In the end, he replaced the network card (along with another hard disk) and the problem vanished.  It turned out, after a lot more analysis, that the virus had managed to lodge itself into the unused portion of the EEPROM memory of the network adaptor.

As I said; hopefully apocryphal.

However, Miller's attack is equally obscure and definitely NOT apocryphal.

What he found was that it was possible to access the smarts in the battery of a MacBook and do some very unexpected things.