Comment on The creator of systemd wants your entire system validated by SecureBoot

• cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  It keeps someone from booting code that hasn’t been signed with my key. That’s the whole point of secure boot. If someone else has the key, then it’s not secure anymore.

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• mech@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  You’re arguing for protecting the PC from malicious changes made by you, the owner.
  This is corporate speak. Yes, it would make sense to lock down a PC like that in a corporate setting.
  For private use, the point is to secure the PC against malicious changes made by other people.
  In this case, signing code yourself is perfectly fine.

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• nyan@lemmy.cafe ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  The chain of trust starts with the owner of the hardware, not some random corporation that happens to make an OS. The owner can, if they wish, outsource the root of the chain of trust to a corporation, but that should be an active decision on their part, not something that happens just because the hardware was shipped with some random OS preloaded.

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  • jj4211@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    The thing is in such a case secureboot doesn’t help and is unnecessary. Secureboot only does anything for the concept of “trusted suppliers”.

    If the system has available signing keys for itself, well, hypothetical malware could sign itself using those same keys The OS security mechanisms are the only things protecting that, and in which case the signature validation is redundant.

    You can have trusted boot, e.g. LUKS volume sealed to TPM PCRs, but secureboot just doesnt make sense as a mechanism for a user to only trust themselves.

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    • nyan@lemmy.cafe ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Thing is, that means you don’t really own the hardware that you buy, because a corporation is dictating what you can do with it even though it doesn’t belong to them. Most of us consider that unacceptable.

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• lmmarsano@group.lt ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  If the end user can arbitrarily sign code themselves that is bootable then it kind of defeats the purpose of secure boot.

  They can & it doesn’t. They can change the platform key to become the platform owner & control the public keys they keep in the code signing databases. Secure Boot gives the platform owner control over authorized code signers of boot processes.

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