Other long term problems

Other long term problems

Posted Jun 12, 2012 7:10 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: Other long term problems by mjg59
Parent article: Fedora, secure boot, and an insecure future

So in order to add keys to the white or blacklists, you need to have the private half of a key already.

Aha, that makes sense. (And, again, had I done fifteen minutes of research rather than fifteen minutes' bloviating, I could probably have figured this out myself. So thanks for the information! :) )

I have horrible visions of vendors' getting the setup mode wrong such that the Pk is changed instead, breaking future updates -- but incompetent though most BIOS vendors are, I suppose the Pk is probably burned into the hardware and unchangeable even by an idiot BIOS.

I must say the thought of BIOS vendors writing anything at all to do with crypto fills me with trepidation. I'm somewhat surprised that PCs can even boot reliably, with the boot process under the control of people as bad at writing code as BIOS vendors... adding extra complexity to this, particularly extra complexity designed to fail in the direction of not booting, seems seriously unwise to me.

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