Items tagged with Secure Boot
Someone at Microsoft is having one of those Southwest moments where the airlines asks, "Want to get away?" That's because someone at the Redmond outfit leaked a security key that could allow attackers to bypass the protections in Windows devices that are put in place through Secure Boot. Worse yet, now that the genie's out of the bottle, there's no putting it back in. Security researchers MY123 and Slipstream discovered the so-called golden key that they say allows someone with admin rights or with physical access to a system to bypass Secure Boot to install and run their operating system of choice, be it Linux or whatever. But beyond that, someone with malicious intentions could plant bootkits...
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When the Linux Foundation announced that it was creating its own UEFI boot solution, it seemed that our woes about not being able to install Linux on Secure Boot systems would soon be coming to an end. While the "pre-bootloader" is still not production-ready, it's been readily worked on, and recently experienced some significant changes. One of the most important goals of this pre-bootloader is that it'd be able to operate with any primary bootloader just fine, such as GRUB. However, due to design choices, the Gummiboot bootloader was simply incompatible. This is a bootloader that's specifically designed to be as lightweight as possible while still being able to take advantage of all that UEFI...
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When word hit the wire last fall that Microsoft's Windows 8 certification could prevent Linux from being installed to a PC, it caused ripples throughout the open-source community. While it's clear that Microsoft would love for its competition to cease to exist, this marked the first time in history where the company actually held the power to prevent its competition from appearing on the computers it certifies - a scary thought. The reason this could happen owes thanks to Microsoft's use of a "Secure Boot" protocol within the UEFI (the BIOS successor). In order for Windows 8 or any other Secure Boot-enabled OS to load up, an authentication key must be presented at boot time in order for the OS...
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It's been a few years since Microsoft really shot itself in the foot by making itself look really unfriendly, and someone at the company must've been missing the pain. A careful read of the company's "Windows 8 Hardware Certification Requirements" document has revealed draconian policies that require vendors to block the installation of other operating systems on ARM devices. First, a bit of history. Earlier this fall, Microsoft briefly made waves when it announced that Windows 8 would require that UEFI (the successor to BIOS) Secure Boot be enabled on all systems that ship with Windows 8 installed. Secure Boot uses vendor-provided signed keys to ensure that the OS in question has been properly...
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