Re: [RFC] Second attempt at kernel secure boot support

From: Jiri Kosina
Date: Tue Nov 06 2012 - 10:19:58 EST


On Tue, 6 Nov 2012, Chris Friesen wrote:

> > Personally, I think the only way out of this mess is to teach users
> > how to disable Secure Boot.
>
> If you're going to go that far, why not just get them to install a RedHat (or
> SuSE, or Ubuntu, or whoever) key and use that instead?

You always need to keep in mind the possibility of the key being revoked.

> Secure boot does arguably solve a class of problems, so it seems a bit odd to
> recommend just throwing it out entirely.

Not really. It doesn't solve the the most usual attack vector used (i.e.
exploiting the bug in the kernel ... and that's independent of the OS we
are talking about).

Just because it contains "secure" in its name, doesn't really make it a
proper security solution. It should rather be called "vendor lock-in
boot", or something like that.

--
Jiri Kosina
SUSE Labs
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