A good article, but I think it tends to present the wireless card issue as something new, when in fact, it's probably an old issue that most of us have never thought about before.

If I understand the wireless card issue correctly (and I may not), vendors of these cards are beginning to distribute the card's firmware as a piece of software that the OS uploads into the device as opposed to having the firmware permanently placed into the device itself. There's really no difference between these cards and previous cards, except for where the firmware lives.

So, the security issues for not having the firmware's source code are the same for any other device currently used in a computer, and the author's arguments about why this is bad are true not only for these wireless cards but for all of the hardware. Without the firmware source, it is much harder to analyze the code for exploits, backdoors, etc.

Perhaps a follow-up article could go into more depth into what sort of attacks might be possible at this level (if it's downloadable firmware, we're below the OS). Also of interest would be what new attacks could be done because the firmware is no longer hard wired into the device (imagine an attacker gaining root and then modifying the firmware to your wireless card).

That said, I don't think we're going to see hardware level exploitation soon. Unfortunetly, there's plenty of places to hack higher up in the system, and I imagine they're much easier to handle.


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Link to this comment: http://www.securityfocus.com/comments/columns/281/29318#29318