this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2024
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Danger Will Robinson! Do NOT fuck with company hardware!
You are going to potentially set off a shit ton of alarm bells, and risk your job, by even attempting this.
First of all, almost all such devices come with a BIOS lock. You'd need to get the password before you could even begin this (again, do not do it!)
Secondly, they'll be able to tell something is up from the foreign UEFI entries.
Thirdly, if that doesn't expose you, Intel IME will. Doesn't matter what operating system you're running.
And you're going to create some royal fucking headaches for a lot of people in your company.
Let's start with security. Remember when I said you'll set off alarm bells? Well, I mean some mother fucking alarm bells. Security will have a god damn aneurysm over this, and they will believe you may be doing this to bypass security, possibly for nefarious reasons. A foreign hard drive with its own OS looks shady as shit.
Then there's the regular tech people. You're going to cause various headaches for them too. Not least because under many service agreements, the company itself may not be authorised to open up the workstations themselves. Many workplaces rent their workstations nowadays, and it is not uncommon to see this language in their SLAs.
Then there's the fact that the OS image on the original drive potentially cannot be trusted any more, so they have to wipe the fucker clean and do a fresh image install.
TL;DR, You are giving your company several solid reasons to fire you for cause by doing this.
On top of all that, most hitting contacts I've seen contain language saying that if you use company resources to make a thing, that thing, the company owns that thing. Seems likely that in addition to firing they could compel you to turn over the drive and wipe it.
If I even tried to plug a USB into my laptop security would be down on top of me like a ton of the proverbial .... the same way that the only true way to be secure is don't plug into the internet the only way not to piss off corporate is don't f*ck with their stuff.
He already boots linux via USB drive on it, I guess the difference to booting from PCI/M.2 drive would not be that different, in terms of security, or did I miss something?
The security implication from a USB boot are probably more severe but also more the fault of the people configuring your work machine. It is expected that people will plug things like pen drives in, to a degree. It is your job to block it with configurations.
The real problem is that once you start adding or removing internal hardware, that configuration no longer stays a trusted one because they've meddled with the components.
I was thinking about the technical details and didn't stop to consider the implications, nice answer.
Also unexpected lost in space reference.