According to UK-based NGS Consulting the high-level language used by the Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) which is used by the power-management services in operating systems could be subverted to hide a rootkit in the flash memory used by the BIOS. This would be a bad thing …
As quoted in a Contractor UK article: “This is so easy to do,” said Greg Hoglund, editor of Rootkit.com. “You have widely available tools, free compilers for the ACPI language, and high-level languages to write the code in.” Interesting stuff particularly as most motherboards that support flash memory-based BIOSes don’t use a physical write-enable switch or a jumper or provide any kind of support for verifying the BIOS contents …
