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Found in the wild: The world’s first unkillable UEFI bootkit for Linux (arstechnica.com)
submitted 2 years ago by purrtastic to c/technology@lemmy.world
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“Whether a proof of concept or not, Bootkitty marks an interesting move forward in the UEFI threat landscape, breaking the belief about modern UEFI bootkits being Windows-exclusive threats,” ESET researchers wrote. “Even though the current version from VirusTotal does not, at the moment, represent a real threat to the majority of Linux systems, it emphasizes the necessity of being prepared for potential future threats.”

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[-] mlg@lemmy.world 11 points 2 years ago

The Fedora doc on this is a bit old but it's still mostly the same:

Secure boot activates a lock-down mode in the Linux kernel which disables various features kernel functionality:

  • Loading kernel modules that are not signed by a trusted key.
  • Using kexec to load an unsigned kernel image.
  • Hibernation and resume from hibernation.
  • User-space access to physical memory and I/O ports.
  • Module parameters that allow setting memory and I/O port addresses.
  • Writing to MSRs through /dev/cpu/*/msr.
  • Use of custom ACPI methods and tables.

The implementation of secure boot is still questionable to this day, but it is understandable that it doesn't always play nice with Linux. I do believe you can use hibernate now as long as you have an encrypted swap (LUKS).

I can definitely see the pain if you happen to be a kernel dev or use linux on any SBC with IO ports you want to mess with in userspace and not make en entire overkill kernel module for.

this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2024
256 points (95.7% liked)

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