On Tue, Sep 04, 2012 at 10:39:57PM +0100, Alan Cox wrote: > > > Well, given that approximately everyone will be booting under EFI within > > > 18 months, treating it as a niche case seems a little short sighted. > > Actually the majority of Linux devices are not PCs 8) ARM's going UEFI as well... > I think it needs to be defined in terms of what the capability is > supposed to guarantee. I have a feeling Matthew has a pretty clear idea > about that in his head so can nail it fairly precisely ? In the absence of this capability, all users (including root) should be unable to cause untrusted code to be executed in ring 0. This requires some straightforward and obvious conditions like "The user must not be able to load untrusted modules", but also conditions like "The user must not be able to cause devices to DMA over the kernel". "The user must not be able to kexec into an untrusted kernel" is at the more obvious end of the scale. This is obviously dependent upon there being some mechanism for ensuring that the initial kernel is trusted in the first place, which is where the firmware security comes in. -- Matthew Garrett | mjg59@xxxxxxxxxxxxx -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-efi" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html