The downside to a centralized authority is that they're a single point of failure. PKIs like the Web PKI mediate this by having multiple central authorities (each issuing CA) and forcing them to engage in cryptographically verifiable audibility schemes that keep them honest (certificate transparency).

It's worth noting that the kind of "small trusted keyring" topology used by Debian, Arch, etc. is a form of centralized signing. It's just an ad-hoc one.

[1] https://shop.certum.eu/open-source-code-signing.html

[2] https://comodosslstore.com/code-signing/comodo-individual-co...

Both of these are super easy to solve without secure boot: The device uses FDE and the key is provided over the network during boot, in the laptop case after the user provides a password. Doing it this way is significantly more secure than using a TPM because the network can stop providing the key as soon as the device is stolen and then the key was never in non-volatile storage anywhere on the device and can't be extracted from a powered off device even with physical access and specialized equipment.

Sure, but an attacker could still overwrite your kernel which your untouched bootloader would then happily run. With SB at least in theory you have a way to validate the entire boot chain.

> why weren't they more common before?

Because security of the rest of the system was not at the point where they made sense. CIH could wipe system firmware and physically brick your PC - why write a bootkit then? Malware then was also less financially motivated.

When malware moved from notoriety-driven to financially-driven in the 2000s, bootkits did become more common with things like Mebroot & TDL/Alureon. More recently, still before Secure Boot was widespread, we had things like the Classic Shell/Audacity trojan which overwrote your MBR: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DD9CvHVU7B4 and Petya ransomware. With SB this is an attack vector that has been largely rendered useless.

It's also a lot more difficult to write a malicious bootloader than it is to write a usermode app that runs itself at startup and pings a C2 or whatever.

No, they were not. They were toys written for fun and/or mischief. The virus authors did not receive any monetary reward from writing them, so they were not even a _business_. So they were the work of individuals, not large teams.

The turning point was Bitcoin. Suddenly it provided all those nice new business models that can be scaled up: mining, stealing cryptowallets, ransomware, etc.

We need this law. Once we have this law, consumers csn get maximum benefit of secure boot withiut losing contorl

1. A customer wants to run their own firmware, or

2. Someone malicious close to the customer, an angry ex, tampers with their device, and uses the lack of Secure Boot to modify the OS to hide all trace of a tracker's existence, or

3. A malicious piece of firmware uses the lack of Secure Boot to modify the boot partition to ensure the malware loads before the OS, thereby permanently disabling all ability for the system to repair itself from within itself

Apple uses #2 and #3 in their own arguments. If your Mac gets hacked, that's bad. If your iPhone gets hacked, that's your life, and your precise location, at all times.

There's also plenty of folks combining this with TPM and boot measurements.

The ugly part of SecureBoot is that all hardware comes with MS's keys, and lots of software assume that you'll want MS in charge of your hardware security, but SecureBoot _can_ be used to serve the user.

Obviously there's hardware that's the exception to this, and I totally share your dislike of it.

An unsigned hash is plenty guard to against tampering. The supply chain and any secret sauce that went into that firmware is just trust. Trust that the blob is well intentioned, trust that you downloaded from the right URL, checked the right SHA, trust that the organization running the URL is sanctioned to do so by Microsoft...

Once all of that trust for every piece of software is concentrated in one organization, Microsoft, Apple or Google, is has become totally meaningless.

i dont think its fair to conflate the tech industries self-owns with microsofts damages. microsoft has for decades poured untold resources and money into capturing everything they possibly could to sustain themselves with honestly what i call cultural and software vendor lock. we're only just now seeing the gaming industry take its first real footsteps towards non-windows targets, but for the most part the decades of evangelizing Microsoft apis and bankrolling schools and education systems to carry courses for their way of doing things makes that a particularly uphill battle thats going to take a lot more time. people have built entire careers out of the microsoft-way in multiple industries. pure microsoft houses are still everywhere at many orgs, so many of them don't even recognize that there is another path. there's plenty of infra/dbadmin/devops people who are just pure windows still. there's multiple points where microsoft did have the best in class solution for something, but these days you'd be hard pressed to not go another way if you were starting from scratch. problem is such a lift and shift is really hard to do for orgs that have spent decades being a microsoft shop.

in a roundabout way, this sort of translates to real long lasting impact/damage to me. microsoft has always been such a force over history that it caused a massive rift in computing. no matter how much they embrace linux and claim to not fight the uphill battle of open source anymore, that modus operandi of locking people into their suite of things still exists on so many fronts and is in some ways more in your face than it's ever been. there's no benefit of the doubt to give here, i just have a hard time choosing microsoft for... well anything.

Explanation: Microslop is a power hungry, greedy and frankly evil corporation whose only goal is complete financial domination of the government, business, and personal tech industries. They actively promote making regressive software, increasing complexity, and hiding straightforward processes behind an information veil.

Example: Go to learn.microsoft.com and try to actually learn HOW to do anything. You'll read 35 pages of text talking about the concept of working with a specific microslop product but not 1 single explicit example of HOW to accomplish a specific task.

Example: Windows 11

Example: Copilot

The whole company is run by backassward tech hicks and digital yokels who can't think past a dime on the floor for a dollar in customer satisfaction, and somehow they run the majority of non-server space or personal device tech on the planet.