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Perhaps I'm just being paranoid, but after this weird crash which gave me a UEFI login prompt I am so scared of getting the ultimate rootkit... the bios/uefi virus. Probably it was because I was swapping hard drives and didn't plug it well enough hence nothing bootable, but it got me thinking:

I have a work computer that I take all my hard drives out of, plug in gaming hard drives and LAN party with no security whatsoever, and then swap my work ones back in. The work disks and play disks are never in at the same time, but surely I should be taking some kind of precaution to make sure that whatever is loading up my work OS hasn't been compromised by the insecure OS. Are there any solutions to this problem? Am I phrasing it correctly? Is there perhaps a motherboard with something like a hardware checksum/hash of the firmware? Are there any crazy hack projects with an "IM ME" or some other piece of third party hardware aimed at ensuring an uncompromised BIOS?

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    This might be better asked on the security stackexchange.
    – Stephanie
    Jun 15, 2012 at 3:58
  • Should I re-ask there or wait for it to get moved? Actually it appears to be a duplicate of a question there. Woops.
    – Mikey
    Jun 15, 2012 at 17:30

2 Answers 2

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I know that there are/were lenovo laptops that checked for certain files on the drive that were related to the BIOS password, and if that password was wiped, then it didn't let the boot go forward.

I imagine there are similar solutions made my other companies.

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If your PC has a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) then you could use a security function like Windows BitLocker for encrypting your drive based on the values from the TPM.

During the boot process the TPM reads out the hash of the BIOS and therefore verifies that the BIOS did not change.

If something was changed the decryption key can not be released which you will then notice as the OS will not start.

See also "Secure Boot" which will be used by Windows 8.

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