[Freedombox-discuss] Without software collusion

[Tim Schmidt]

On Thu, Jun 28, 2012 at 4:39 PM, Rick Hodgin <foxmuldrster at yahoo.com> wrote:
> That's been my point all along.  Out of band in this context means the OS and hypervisor and any security running on the computer itself is on the other side of these communications.  It's happening outside of the frame of reference of their observation.

Sure.  But there's a MAJOR difference between out of reference of one
computer's operation, and out of reference of every computer on the
network's observation.  And when you talk about an ethernet frame
being out-of-band, you're talking about the latter.  It's not out of
band, because the switch had to be aware of it in order to route it to
your NIC.

Covert communication through the power supply by artificially loading
the GPU (CPUs are too obvious), to spike power usage in such a way as
to produce morse code dots and dashes someone could only decode if
they knew they were there, and monitoring the power usage of the
machine is out of band.

Sending an ethernet frame is just sending an ethernet frame.

--tim