> The two following techniques were pretty common under MS DOS several years
> ago (see the "Bios Companion" [4] for instance).
> It made use of debug to access physical ports. Under Linux, this
> requires special permissions that are given using ioperm.
> The main idea to reset CMOS is to make the checksum fail.
To make the CMOS checksum fail in the 'good old DOS days' I just typed a
file to CLOCK$ which caused the CMOS to be partly overwritten, disabling
the BIOS password checks.
I agree with you on the fact that plaintext password storage is outdated.
> The two following techniques were pretty common under MS DOS several years
> ago (see the "Bios Companion" [4] for instance).
> It made use of debug to access physical ports. Under Linux, this
> requires special permissions that are given using ioperm.
> The main idea to reset CMOS is to make the checksum fail.
To make the CMOS checksum fail in the 'good old DOS days' I just typed a
file to CLOCK$ which caused the CMOS to be partly overwritten, disabling
the BIOS password checks.
I agree with you on the fact that plaintext password storage is outdated.
Kind regards,
Ron van Daal
The Netherlands
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