David WE Roberts wrote:

"The Natural Philosopher" wrote in message
...
Tim Streater wrote:
In article ,
Jules Richardson wrote:

Yes, I don't think there's much BIOS interaction once a modern OS
has booted, but the point is that BIOS code *is* run at system
startup ...

Only if you have a machine with a BIOS.

I am not sure how you bootstrap an OS without a modicum of BIOS or at
least a ROM based boot loader.

Unless the whole machine runs out of ROM..


Just wandering idly by after a holiday break.
Just wondered (reading all this stuff) if something was inserted into
RAM at boot time, ran memory resident, and kept an area of SWAP for any
data storage, how detectable would it be in the log files?

if it didn't log, it wouldn't be in the logs
But you would need to install the program that did it, and that would be
root access and would be logged.

Ram comes empty - or random rather.
Anything to be put into it needs a disk based file

Disk based files are detectable



Or even if it used raw access to the disc to use any spare, unformatted
areas or suchlike?
Certainly wouldn't show up on any checksum of the filestore.



--
To people who know nothing, anything is possible.
To people who know too much, it is a sad fact
that they know how little is really possible -
and how hard it is to achieve it.