Subject: Re: wpi0: Full open source driver at openbsd
To: None <tech-kern@NetBSD.org>
From: der Mouse <mouse@Rodents.Montreal.QC.CA>
List: tech-kern
Date: 10/05/2007 12:51:56
>> This is not a blob in the sense that it could be potentially
>> dangerous since the firmware only runs on the card and nothing of
>> that is run on your computer.

And this makes it non-dangerous..how, exactly?  Do you never send
anything over your network interfaces or something?  The firmware is
perfectly positioned to meddle with and/or snoop on anything sent or
received over that interface.

> If your network card can access memory (and it _must_ be able to, or
> it would be mostly useless), then it _is_ potentially dangerous.  It
> could probably fairly easily dump anything in RAM over the network to
> some other machine.

Only if the DMA mapping is set up to allow it access to that RAM - or
if your machine is so stupidly designed that a DMA bus master can
access memory it hasn't specifically been set up with access to.  While
there are undoubtedly such systems, I would hope that nothing using a
wpi would be quite that low-end.

I do, however, know that it's not going to be used on *my* systems.  (I
won't use an ath either, because of the lack of source to the HAL.)

/~\ The ASCII				der Mouse
\ / Ribbon Campaign
 X  Against HTML	       mouse@rodents.montreal.qc.ca
/ \ Email!	     7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39  4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B