Is it safe to allow unprivileged users to access raw1394?
Answer added in November 2009 The risks of user access to raw1394 are: • It allows direct control of FireWire-attached devices. However, in order to do something really dangerous like overwriting device firmware or reading/ modifying data from a FireWire storage device, the user would need non-trivial purpose-made software. • It may allow read/ write access to memory of other PCs which are plugged into the FireWire bus together with the PC which runs raw1394. Whether such access is possible and to which extent depends on the remote PC’s operating system and hardware platform. • It may allow read/ write access to memory of your PC if you have more than one FireWire controller and plug them together to a single bus. This depends on settings of the ohci1394 kernel driver and on the hardware platform of your PC. In light of this, many people will consider it reasonably safe to allow unprivileged users access to /dev/raw1394 on a typical desktop PC. Safety concerns with raw1394 and ohci1394
