Bottomley: Owning your Windows 8 UEFI Platform

> The things she cares about are trojans sniffing things like banking-
> details and passwords, and perhaps weaknesses in browsers or other
> exposed programs that leads to the PC becoming zombied.

True

> Secure boot makes essentially no difference to any of this. If you've
> got a unpatched IE, or an outdated version of Java, or if you
> double-click everything you get in email, you're precisely as screwed
> with or without secure boot.

True too. But you then ignore that secure boot removes an attack vector. That attack vector has not been used as much as it was during the DOS times, where BIOS vendors after a while added features to block writes to the boot sector. Secure boot ensures that the core OS loaded is unmodified. Which can even be seen as an extension of this old "don't write to boot sector" feature.

Secure boot makes it in fact harder to modify the earliest code loaded on a system. If you get trojans, backdoors, keyloggers, etc loaded at the very earliest boot stages, it is also more likely you can hide that code from the end-user's additional security programs. This is the attack vector secure boot can defend against. And the reason such an attack might be possible, is due to lack of secure boot and not properly updated system with latest updates for OS, third-party software and anti-virus/anti-scam/anti-spam/anti-whatever software. Secure boot is an additional layer of security, not a replacement of anything else.

Sure the boot process might not be the easiest attack vector at all, but the end-user side is getting more and more attention through security products, making the currently used attacks harder. Secure boot is just filling a gap, a gap which is best solved hardware wise. And if nothing is done in this area, this is where more attacks will be diverted in the future. And with "nothing", I also include "disable secure boot".

For the end-user, such security mechanisms needs to stay out of their way. Just like firewalls. And that is the current standard. However, firewalls can be tweaked even better, which is not a task the average end-user might care for at all. But the firewall is there with a usually decent protection. Users interested in a higher security level can tweak this to make it harder.

Secure boot is a similar mechanism. Most users shouldn't ever notice it as, as you say, they won't change the OS. But for those who do change the OS; providing mechanisms to have a secure system, even through the boot sequence, is a good idea.

Remember all the fuzz and noise caused when Microsoft enabled the firewall by default in one of the Windows XP service pack? This discussion about secure boot is an iteration of that. But very few hardly complain about that decision nowadays.

But by all means, there are people who disables firewalls, SELinux, authentication mechanisms, etc, etc - and in the future secure boot ... For such users anything which says "increased security" will always be a hassle, no matter what it is, and it will be disabled. That attitude is a failure by default, IMO.