iViZ discovers new vulnerability affecting Microsoft, Intel, HP, Lenovo and others
2 Sep 2008, 1203 Hrs

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Kolkota, Sept 1(ANI/Business Wire India): iViZ, an Indian information security startup offering on-demand Penetration Testing, announced its discovery of a new class of vulnerability earlier this month at Defcon 16, the world's leading security conference.

This vulnerability allows attackers to steal computer boot passwords and bypass the security of pre-boot authentication software like hard disk encryption tools.

It affects general computer users, enterprises, governments and can result in unauthorized access or theft of confidential data. Incidentally, in 2007 the global loss due to data theft is estimated to be USD 40 Billion.

"Surprisingly, this vulnerability has been existing for 25 years," said Jonathan Brossard, iViZ lead security researcher and discoverer of this vulnerability.

"Programmers unaware of this have coded boot password feature such that user password is not flushed properly leading to inadvertent text leakage and theft from memory. Even hard-drive encryption does not help here," added Brossard.

This vulnerability affects Microsoft Bitlocker on the latest TPM (but not Vista SP1), Truecrypt, Intel/HP BIOS and several others.

As a part of responsible disclosure practice, iViZ has already briefed all the affected vendors.

"We appreciate vendors like Microsoft, Intel, HP proactively providing fixes to users. iViZ is committed to initiatives making the web safe and conducts research that helps secure organizations worldwide," said Bikash Barai, CEO of iViZ.

Bill Sisk, security response communication manager at Microsoft, via his email to RedmondMag, encouraged "customers to update their systems accordingly". (ANI)