The bootstrap process on EFI systems

Posted Feb 18, 2015 6:29 UTC (Wed) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239)
In reply to: The bootstrap process on EFI systems by marcH
Parent article: The bootstrap process on EFI systems

We try. There were many operating systems booting on BIOS before Linux came along, and so many of the quirks were already known. That wasn't the case with UEFI. The issues we keep hitting are cases where we implemented functionality without knowing what Windows did, and so poked different functions in different ways and exercised different bugs. The last four years have been an exercise in identifying areas where we still have disparities and dealing with them.

The bootstrap process on EFI systems

Posted Feb 18, 2015 6:33 UTC (Wed) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (1 responses)

> and so poked different functions in different ways and exercised different bugs.

I guess none of these bugs ever had any security impact *cough* since it would invalidate Secure Boot *cough*.

The bootstrap process on EFI systems

Posted Feb 18, 2015 7:14 UTC (Wed) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]

Yeah, nothing we've hit has been a strong security issue - there's been a couple of denial of service cases, but nothing that allowed arbitrary code. There *have* been issues in some firmware implementations that permitted arbitrary code to be executed, and some of those could be used to circumvent Secure Boot on some platforms. Software is hard.