Items tagged with UEFI
A team from Binarly, a firmware protection company, recently discovered several repeatable anomalies on twenty different enterprise machines in the course of a job for a midsize enterprise company. After looking further into these anomalies and digging all the way down into the disassembly code, the team found 23...
Read more...
Ever since BIOS updates became possible, the process required rebooting the PC. Even when motherboard manufacturers moved completely to UEFI, this remained the case. Intel is now changing that, thanks to a new part of the ACPI specification called Platform Firmware Runtime Update and Telemetry (PFRUT). This allows for...
Read more...
When someone thinks of malware, the usual thought is an EXE file containing offending code that is downloaded to a target machine and executed by the user. However, a team at SecureList is trying to make people aware that an incredibly persistent malware framework can exist within a PC's UEFI firmware. The team...
Read more...
Intel is getting ready to kick legacy BIOS support to the curb, with future platforms taking full advantage of the UEFI Class 3, the most recent version of UEFI. That is already the case for many Intel systems already shipping. By 2020, Intel wants to move on completely, removing BIOS support from UEFI. That means all...
Read more...
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...
Read more...
Lenovo is finding itself embroiled in yet another security scandal, and this time it revolves around the BIOS used in many of its PC systems. According to security researcher Dmytro Oleksiuk (aka Cr4sh), the vulnerability lies in the SystemSmmRuntimeRt UEFI driver component of Lenovo’s firmware. Oleksiuk claims that...
Read more...
Gigabyte had us out to their L.A. offices to show off their latest line of motherboards packing the Intel Z87 chipset, and as usual, the company has a whole lot of SKUs coming down the pike. Clearly, the most work went into Gigabyte’s OC and gaming lines, but there are plenty of welcome surprises and new features in this launch. Extreme...
Read more...
Can something that's just taken a couple of months to arrive still be considered "long-awaited"? If so, the official Linux UEFI pre-bootloader fits the bill, as it's something that's been needed ever since the introduction of the Microsoft-pushed Secure Boot mechanism on UEFI-equipped PCs. We've talked about this pre-bootloader a couple of...
Read more...
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...
Read more...
Linux users have long had the right to be concerned about UEFI's "SecureBoot" feature, and this is a perfect justification for it. It seems that on select Samsung notebook models, merely booting into Linux via UEFI can brick it. We're not just talking about something that an OS re-install could fix, either - it...
Read more...
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...
Read more...
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...
Read more...
