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

I'm not going to be able to make this either. Do you know if it is going to be recorded?

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From: "George Zipperlen" <george.zipperlen@mail.com>
To: "Philadelphia Linux User's Group Discussion List" <plug@lists.phillylinux.org>
Sent: Monday, April 16, 2018 4:05:22 PM
Subject: [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:

http://drexel.edu/cci/news-events/events/details/?eid=19071&iid=53988

Computer Science Departmental Talk: Dr. Ron Minnich, Google
Wednesday, April 18, 2018
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.

RSVP online at http://drexelcci.info/minnich

Contact Information
raiken@drexel.edu

George Zipperlen

george.zipperlen@mail.com

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