December 19, 2019

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Replace Your Exploit-Ridden Firmware with Linux - Ronald Minnich, Google

Replace Your Exploit-Ridden Firmware with Linux - Ronald Minnich, Google

With the WikiLeaks release of the vault7 material, the security of the UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) firmware used in most PCs and laptops is once again a concern. UEFI is a proprietary …

Talk Title Replace Your Exploit-Ridden Firmware with Linux - Ronald Minnich, Google
Speakers Ron Minnich (Software Engineer, Google)
Conference Open Source Summit Europe
Conf Tag
Location Prague, Czech Republic
Date Oct 21-27, 2017
URL Talk Page
Slides Talk Slides
Video

With the WikiLeaks release of the vault7 material, the security of the UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) firmware used in most PCs and laptops is once again a concern. UEFI is a proprietary and closed-source operating system, with a codebase almost as large as the Linux kernel, that runs when the system is powered on and continues to run after it boots the OS (hence its designation as a “Ring -2 hypervisor"). It is a great place to hide exploits since it never stops running, and these exploits are undetectable by kernels and programs. Our answer to this is NERF (Non-Extensible Reduced Firmware), an open source software system developed at Google to replace almost all of UEFI firmware with a tiny Linux kernel and initramfs. The initramfs file system contains an init and command line utilities from the u-root project (http://u-root.tk/), which are written in the Go language.

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