COMMAND

    IBM thinkpad

SYSTEMS AFFECTED

    IBM thinkpad

PROBLEM

    Pavel Machek found following.  He discovered few misfeatures,  and
    few bugs, some of them are related to security.  Here it goes.

    * Thinkpad will boot from floppy, even if it has boot-up  sequence
      set to hard drive first and hard disk is bootable. Floppy has to
      have IBM bootsector  for this to  work, for example  personality
      setting boot disk distributed by IBM has it.  Pavel successfully
      created Linux  boot disk,  which can  be used  on Thinkpad  with
      floppy booting disabled.  If someone relied on boot up  sequence
      for security (I believe many  people do), you are screwed.  (BTW
      use it as a  feature).  Thinkpad will  refuse to boot, if  their
      self-tests  fail  (which  is  pretty  bad  behaviour:  if   your
      trackpoint fails,  you are  not unable  to get  to critical data
      stored on  your thinkpad).   Anyway, if  you put  IBM floppy, it
      will boot even if self-tests failed.  So you can at least access
      your data.

    * Thinkpad  will allow  people to  change personality information,
      even  without  supervisor  password.  Thinkpad has "personality"
      feature which allows  people to mark  their computer with  their
      name,  address,  and  picture.   Unfortunately,  this  info   is
      changeable  even  without  supervisor  password. (And BTW floppy
      which allows you  to change it  has "magic" format.)  This might
      be  more  severe  than  it  seems,  because, setting personality
      information  means  flashing  bios.   Not  sure  if  flashing in
      modified bios is UN-doable.

    * Easy setup - HDD tests. Easy setup is just plain ugly.  It looks
      like a perfectly  safe thing.   Well, it will  overwrite part of
      your hard drive without even asking for confirmation.  It  seems
      like hard  drives come  preformated to  slightly little capacity
      then they really  have.  The  rest is test  zone, used for  easy
      setup's rw tests.  But if you happen to re-fdisk your drive,  it
      is pretty  easy to  put normal  partition into  this zone  (this
      zone is not documented anywhere).  This one killed 2000 of  your
      inodes 4 times.  Last two times was random person coming  around
      computer,  and  launching  tests  because  machine asked them to
      do so.  Beware!

SOLUTION

    Nothing yet.