Take the 2-minute tour ×  I understand that Firewire 400/800 and
Thunderbolt have DMA enabled, and a malicious hardware device
can easily read and manipulate system memory at will. If I
disable the software drivers for these devices, would that
prevent such reading/writing? Or is the only way to protect
against DMA by desoldering the controller or injecting epoxy in
the ports?  share|improve this question  migrated from
superuser.com Jul 10 '12 at 17:26   Is this really a realistic
threat in your environment? Do you really expect people to have
the ability to be able to attach custom hardware to your
computer in order to perform an attack? If they have physical
access to your computer, why wouldn't they simply perform many
of the easier attacks? –  Zoredache Jul 10 '12 at 16:36 This
may, in fact, be the easier attack. If you are operating customs
at the border of a nation with repressive data privacy laws, a
single engineer can make a device that unlocks locked screens on
laptops and retrieves encryption keys