Garrett: UEFI secure booting (part 2)

Like identity cards with lots of details stopped people from denying political regimes like that in Hitler's Germany? (I know that this is a potentially sticky example, but it's a real time and place where showing your papers was expected and used to enforce rules.) The counterfeiters will co-opt the process and steal Windows' signing keys so that they can pass themselves off as the authentic article, and they'll probably do it without too much trouble.

I'm going to call this a piece of 'security theatre' -- it's show. While it might make some malware attacks more difficult, there are a few things we need to remember:
* we're the customers of the device manufacturers, so we should be able to influence the product choices available (so I'm preparing a letter to write to the people who sell me hardware, which says that I want to buy their hardware and I want to choose what software I run on it);
* we haven't exactly seen a track record of good security practice from Microsoft;
* the anti-trust implications of the Windows Logo program needs to be referred to our lawmakers;
* finally, we will want to weigh up this prospect of buying a Windows-8-badged device with limited liberty to use its general-purpose components against the adage about trading-eternal-liberty-for-temporary-security.

Take care.
K3n.