George Zipperlen on 16 Apr 2018 13:05:30 -0700


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[PLUG] Talk at Drexel on NERF -- A FOSS alternative to UEFI


Short notice, but I just ran across this talk coming up this Wednesday at Drexel (can’t make it myself)
on NERF : A Linux based replacement for the UEFI boot firmware interface:

Computer Science Departmental Talk: Dr. Ron Minnich, Google

11:00 AM-12:00 PM

"Replace your exploit-ridden firmware with a Linux Kernel"


By Dr. Ron Minnich, Software Engineer at 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 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.

Contact Information

raiken@drexel.edu


-- 
George Zipperlen




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