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Not sure...
by Neolander on Sun 4th Mar 2012 09:06 UTC
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I'm not sure if IOMMUs represent that big of a defense against hardware backdoors. Here is why :

Let's say that I buy a laptop from a shady vendor. Like with any laptop, the hardware inside of it is pretty much a perfect black box to me. What makes me sure that all hardware on my motherboard will be connected to the memory bus through an IOMMU ? What prevents the laptop manufacturer (or someone else in the manufacturing chain) from just putting a "spy chip" directly on the memory bus, invisible to the OS ?

Now, I'm not saying that IOMMUs are useless for security. When using insecure external interfaces that let any peripheral access all physical memory, such as Firewire or Thunderbolt*, IOMMUs can prevent a simplistic and hot-pluggable "pen drive" from completely busting OS security. If you can trust your computer, then IOMMUs allow you not to trust what you plug in it, which is already something.

Also, security aside, IOMMUs are a great tool for virtualization.

* As far as I know, USB has no such vulnerability. Operating systems should, however, make sure that USB packets coming from devices are standard-compliant if they want to avoid the PS3's tragic fate (more details here : )

Edited 2012-03-04 09:12 UTC

Reply Score: 2