On Sun, Aug 12, 2018, 1:44 PM James Knott via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
On 08/12/2018 01:26 PM, Russell Reiter via talk wrote:
Some wag deemed it a "ring 4" exploit.
Many years ago, I was a computer tech, working on a variety of systems, including the VAX 11/780 and Data General Eclipse. Both of those had a writable control store and the VAX even loaded it's microcode from a floppy at boot. One ot the things I had to do, when repairing Eclipse computers was work my way through the microcode, using a very large listing and a logic probe, along with the microstep switch on the front panel. The Eclipse used 4 AMD 4 bit slice processors and, IIRC, over 100 bits wide ROM to contain the instruction set. With the WCS, I expect it would be fairly easy to insert malware.
Thats an interesting paradigm shift. Searching through the physical setup using logic tools old school, vs new school; searching through patent records just to be able to find the hardware.
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