Microsoft patches Windows to eliminate Secure Boot bypass threat
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Summary
A vulnerability in Windows devices could be exploited by attackers with privileged access to run malicious firmware during the boot-up process, and it could survive a hard drive reformat.
Secure Boot was introduced in 2012 to counter such attacks, creating a chain of trust in linked files to verify the digital signature of each firmware component before it is run.
The UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) in Secure Boot was supposed to verify the digital signature of third-party UEFI apps, but some apps were being overlooked.
These apps could then be used to bypass Secure Boot and run unsigned malicious code before the OS had even loaded.
Microsoft has now introduced a patch for this, but the status of Linux devices is unclear.
It is not known how widely the vulnerability was exploited.
