Update your Dell laptop: 5 serious security flaws have been found

March 22, 2022 Matt Mills News 0

Five new security weaknesses in the Dell BIOS have been disclosed that, if successfully exploited, could lead to code execution on vulnerable systems. These risks at the UEFI level are not new, they were announced in 2016 and are still present no matter how much the brands try to show the contrary.

The information has been released by Binarly, a company specialized in protecting devices from emerging firmware and hardware threats using modern artificial intelligence, after working together with the brand to resolve these vulnerabilities by coordinating the application of patches to code execution vulnerabilities. of the Dell BIOS.

Five different vulnerabilities

Registered as CVE-2022-24415, CVE-2022-24416, CVE-2022-24419, CVE-2022-24420, and CVE-2022-24421, the high-severity vulnerabilities are rated 8.2 out of 10 on the security system. Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS), a free and open industry standard for assessing the severity of computer system security vulnerabilities.

dell motherboard

The description of these five vulnerabilities is as follows: « Dell BIOS contains an incorrect input validation vulnerability. A locally authenticated malicious user can potentially exploit this vulnerability by using a system management interrupt (SMI) to gain arbitrary code execution during system administration (SMM).”

In essence, they are based on the UsbRt AMI attack vector , which is widespread in the industry and exposes massive attack surfaces in corporate networks. The UsbRt vulnerability was first discovered in 2016 and was named Aptiocalypsis. However, due to the complexity of the code, multiple variants of the bug were later discovered.

AMI stated that it “resolved and closed this security issue several years ago”, but these new indications show that it is still in the BIOS, so the Binarly team recommends removing the UsbRt component from future UEFI firmware updates to reduce the footprint. attack. Due to the complexity of the code in this component, it is difficult to maintain this code and absorb an acceptable security risk from running arbitrary code in System Management Mode (SMM).

System management mode refers to a special purpose CPU mode on x86 microcontrollers that is designed to handle system-wide functions such as power management, system hardware control, thermal monitoring, and other manufacturer-developed code owner.

Affected Dell Products and Correction

From the manufacturer, of which at least Binarly acknowledges that “about three months passed from when the problem was reported until the patch was released, when the usual schedule with other providers is almost six months”, they have recommended updating the BIOS of all clients as soon as possible.