“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.”
The Bootkitty sample ESET found is unable to override a defense, known as UEFI Secure Boot, that uses cryptographic signatures to ensure that each piece of software loaded during startup is trusted by a computer’s manufacturer.
AKA not that big of a deal, yet. An article from another post about this also mentions GRUB explicitly as a requirement as well as PoC using self signed keys, which renders it sort of impossible to abuse.
UKI + your own keys + secure boot is still not broken.
Unfortunately a lot of people in the Linux world still hate secure boot because they associate it with locking your PC to only running windows. Never mind the fact that basically every big Linux distro plays nicely with secure boot these days, and has for a while now.
I associate it with the fight I’ve had every single time I tried to use it. It’s never been a smooth process on any server I attempted to use it on. Usually I either run into problems with a system not wanting to properly boot the memory stick even with a full UEFI image flashed to it, or if I do get that to work I go through the whole installation process only to find the system unbootable for whatever reason. Eventually I just give up and do a standard installation because why should I have to work this hard to put an OS on a machine?
