Technology

60101 readers

2112 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

255

Found in the wild: The world’s first unkillable UEFI bootkit for Linux (arstechnica.com)

submitted 4 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

39 comments fedilink hide all child comments

“Whether a proof of concept or not, Bootkitty marks an interesting move forward in the UEFI threat landscape, breaking the belief about modern UEFI bootkits being Windows-exclusive threats,” ESET researchers wrote. “Even though the current version from VirusTotal does not, at the moment, represent a real threat to the majority of Linux systems, it emphasizes the necessity of being prepared for potential future threats.”

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 weeks ago

The Fedora doc on this is a bit old but it's still mostly the same:

Secure boot activates a lock-down mode in the Linux kernel which disables various features kernel functionality:

Loading kernel modules that are not signed by a trusted key.

Using kexec to load an unsigned kernel image.

Hibernation and resume from hibernation.

User-space access to physical memory and I/O ports.

Module parameters that allow setting memory and I/O port addresses.

Writing to MSRs through /dev/cpu/*/msr.

Use of custom ACPI methods and tables.

The implementation of secure boot is still questionable to this day, but it is understandable that it doesn't always play nice with Linux. I do believe you can use hibernate now as long as you have an encrypted swap (LUKS).

I can definitely see the pain if you happen to be a kernel dev or use linux on any SBC with IO ports you want to mess with in userspace and not make en entire overkill kernel module for.