Noone asked me, but if you are curious what my take on the recent sbat/SecureBoot kerfuffle is, I'll let you know anyway:

Frankly, I find SecureBoot ultimately pretty uninteresting tech. It casts a very wide net: it basically is a politically charged global allowlist, yet is useful as a very very lose denylist only, because it necessarily contains so so so much stuff. I think the value for security is relatively limited, because it it attempts to be universal, and hence can never be focussed.

Much more interesting is Measured Boot when tying disk encryption to it. Various OSes, including Windows have been supporting this since about forever. And it's so much better: it basically makes no restrictions on what you can run on your PC. All it enforces is: my encrypted disk can only be decrypted if the OS of my choice is booted in the version of my choice. And that's a *way* more powerful concept, because it is *focussed* on your installation, because…

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…it is is "democratic", in the sense that anyone can do this without having to get their keys into some centralized keyring.

Hence, to me it implications of SB are simply not worth it, it brings very little to the table security wise, but creates massive headaches on deployment. MB otoh actually provides a high level of security, and you don't have to ask anyone to put together your own policies.

Hence if you ask me: focus on making MB a thing on Linux, and bother with SB only to the level…

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…you really have to.

(I am trying to do my part on this of course, i.e. in systemd we measure a lot of things during boot now, and our FDE logic is hooked up with it.)

[That all said, I think SB might have some value if you enroll your own keys, which however can only work on very specific hw, and in VMs, but is probably not a solution realistic for general purpose PCs]

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@pid_eins @system76 You working on this perchance?

· Librem Social · 1 · 0 · 0

@trelane @pid_eins Secure Boot does support User Keys which you can do with our firmware on our Intel laptops.

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