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Wednesday, March 9, 2011
Latest State of The BIOS Disassembly Book
Hello guys. First I would like to apologize for the very late delivery of the book. I've been dragging my feet with other works over the past few months and hadn't been able to do considerable work on the book.
Anyway, I have discussed everything with my publisher and co-author Luis Miras and we decided that we should push forward much more aggressively. Well, I decided to do a "restart" because the first four chapters that I have finished last year requires a lot of rework. If you have ideas on new stuff which you think should be included, feel free to talk about it in the comment section.
Thanks.
Darmawan
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22 comments:
Hi Darmawan!
Great news. looking forward for the release.
Will be interesting to find UEFI related content.
Hi Darmawan,
Waiting for your book to be published. Since UEFI is hot nowadays, I would expect a detailed section on the same in your book.
Thanks,
Anshul
Hello all,
I've been placing UEFI as one of top priority for sometime. Well, I think I have to improve the coverage. Thanks for the opinion guys.
Please, add some notes about laptop-specific, Embedded controller, etc...
Please add some information about Embedded Controllers used in mobile platforms for powermanagemnt.
Hey, do you happen to have a list of current/previous topics covered? That would make it easier to suggest topics or ideas congruent with the direction you want to go. If you can get your hands on lopptop stuff, absolutly! When I look at a diagram of an older laptop and see no physical, electrical or chipset feature as reason to limit the RAM to 2 gig and I'm sitting here with 4 gig, I think some details on to wake up additional chipset circuits would be great! Thanks for taking the ti,e all these years and bringing forth the deep-down nity-grity that no one else seems to be able to do.
-Ross
By the way, can you add, say, yahoo or facebook or some other common accounts out there to your profile selection dropdown? Anonymous works, but.......
-Ross
Hey, how about some ideas on setting up the BIOS so that it can be relatively easily recovered after a BIOS virus attack? The failsafe option with it only being assesable under certain conditions or something might work. Maybe a way of telling if the BIOS has been written to without proper code or hash key that is campaired at startup and if eronious, the failsafe mode and prompt (say, a beep code or a signal out to the UART as you were saying, if that is all that room on the chip permits). Now, I'm a hands-on person and I like to learn how to do it, myself, but maybe though-out the book, one could learn the skills and background to accomplish such a task. Just an idea from "out in the field"!
-Ross
About the Facebook account for comments. I will add that later. Thanks for the idea. I didn't notice how much people with Facebook account have been hanging around here :P.
Please, include some more information about SMBus/SPD and RAM init stage.
I think maybe a good addition to the book would be some practical exercise, using the freely available VMWare Player. A VM is probably the safest way to get started with custom BIOS, and it's easy to make sure everybody has access to the same virtual HW then.
I just blogged on how to craft a VMware BIOS from scratch, that does simple serial I/O, and set the sources to the public domain, so feel free to use that if you want...
Please add information about Embedded controller used in mobile platforms for powermanagement
Hi there,
I'm very interested in your BIOS book but couldn't find it for sale anywhere (except on Amazon at a huge price for used copies). Can I just buy a PDF directly from you ? =)
Hi. When your book will be available to buy?? Greets from Poland. [szczebrzeszynski chrzaszcz]
Hi guys, I'm thinking about releasing the first edition PDF later (the unedited version I have at hand) for free. It's pretty big. Circa 12MB. Any idea how/where to host it? I can place it in my free google-hosted website but I'm not sure if it can handle the load later.
Perhaps I can help. Email me.
Host the first edition on a torrent; it's a proper use of the technology! Or just use one of the free filing sharing services; since you own the intellectual property.
It'd be AWESOME if you were to release the first edition as a .pdf. That would likely increase interest in your upcoming published edition...
Well, I need to go through the legal documents (contract)) to make sure no one would be sued first :-).
Hi Darmawan,
i want to ask. Do you have article about phoenix bios disassembly and ida pro script for that?
greets from jakarta:D.
Your question is a bit less specific than what it should be :-). Phoenix BIOS after Award and Phoenix merged (Award-Phoenix v6.0) has a rather different code base (it's based on Award BIOS source code) compared to the previous Phoenix BIOS source code (the original Phoenix BIOS source code). Regarding article specifically targeted to Phoenix, I don't have any. It wasn't covered in my book too. However, if you're talking about legacy BIOS code (pre-EFI/UEFI), the compression is based on LZH, but probably a modified one, I don't remember exactly. As for the decompressor IDA Pro script, I don't have any. I build a custom IDA Pro plugin for Award BIOS back then. It should be easy to build one. Just use Haruhiko Okumura source code with a little bit of modification. It should work. Anton Borisov used to code a decompressor for most legacy BIOS but I don't know whether it's still hosted somewhere or not. IDA Pro script won't cut it I think because there are unsigned variables which should be treated as 16-bit integers (lot's of routines depends on wrap-around effects) which would poorly handled by IDA Pro script.
Hello... I am glad to see the new book is in production....been waiting a long time to read it. Do you have a date when it will be ready?
Hi Will. I haven't been in contact with NoStarch Press again. What I'm doing now is research. Hopefully, it will be published there. Anyway, the field has been growing immensely since the first book. So, I think it won't be a reboot. But, probably something quite different focusing more on UEFI than anything else. For the moment, just watch for my upcoming BIOS articles over at http://resources.infosecinstitute.com/author/darmawan-salihun/. It should be a little bit of glimpse on the present work.
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