UEFITool VS coreboot

Open 1 E7250A24 -- 1 System BIOS with BIOS Guard vA.24.bin file with UEFITool

UEFIPatch from LongSoft's GitHub A UEFI patchtool built on the older UEFITool engine. UEFITool is not needed for this patch, only the UEFIPatch applcation.

Download UEFITool from https://github.com/LongSoft/UEFITool/releases for example UEFITool_NE_A66_win32.zip is hidden behind the show all assets button

There's a discussion here about this being done successfully on a ThinkPad T460 with a SPI programmer and UEFITool. The same method should apply to the T460p.

UEFITool: https://github.com/LongSoft/UEFITool/releases

If HPET is not an option in firmware, then it is disabled (0x00) and hidden from you. Which in practice is bad. The only option for users in this case is to download your firmware from the vendor, use this tool to locate the register and set the value with this tool to enabled (0x01).

UEFITool

How to view proprietary blobs on your system

I have been a long ThinkPad user and have bought an XPS 13 for the first time. I changed my boot logo on my machines before using this tool following this guide.

> Show me a FLOSS implementation of this standard and you will have a point

I've had a point from my first comment and it hasn't changed in validity. It's just taking time to convince you, but I think I'm making progress :)

I referenced several open implementations in my last reply, an a cursory search reveals more [1] [2]. Besides, this still doesn't help you trust the hardware, even if that hardware is entirely open like some sort of RISC chip. Can you verify every step in the supply chain? At every stage of assembly? No? Or, assuming a trusted device, can you be 100% confident something wasn't added, a simple keylogger? Most keyboards can be removed from laptops without leaving a trace, so can screen casings, speakers, batteries, etc. Plenty of places to hide something tiny.

> At the moment, I would have to trust a megacorporation obeying NSA,

That's less likely than the software you use having been compromised, for example by introducing an obfuscated bug, or MitMing as you perform a software update (many software update mechanisms have notoriously weak security, search some defcon talks on the subject).

> Your threat model may vary.

No, what I'm saying applies to all threat models, and I challenge you to name one to disprove that.

Secure boot is an open standard and can be implemented in a trustworthy and secure way, you just need to put in the work to do so. It's entirely possible to do so.

Of course if you are putting in all that work, if you are that at risk, you would need to switch your software stack entirely as well and use something like seL4 as a starting point.

[1] https://github.com/prplfoundation/prpl-secure-boot

[2] https://www.coreboot.org/

Why BIOS (did you mean UEFI?) when it runs the best boot loader, which is Coreboot¹. Many users would love to re-flash their bios/uefi for it, if it’s supported.

1: https://www.coreboot.org/

Coreboot is 0.6% C++.

NovaCustom ; some models come with Dasharo a coreboot distribution.

You can also use Mr. Chromebox Script to install Coreboot on your chromebook to get a UEFI BIOS on your Chromebook and then you can go an install either a linux distro or even Windows if you want. It's a pretty straightforward process and also reversable if you want to go back to just using ChromeOS.

Some models are available with Dasharo a [coreboot]https://www.coreboot.org/) distribution.

why no haswell_ult_dmi_registers for broadwell? in https://github.com/coreboot/coreboot/blob/master/util/inteltool/pcie.c

use croshfirmware.sh from https://github.com/coreboot/coreboot/tree/master/util/chromeos

There may be other protections to restrict SPI flash access for security reasons (so you might not be able to flash your custom firmware in the OS), but worst case you can use a HW flasher (or maybe USB flashback). Still, this doesn't address the elephant in the room - platform initialization code might be open-sourced, but that isn't everything. You'll still need to figure out the board-specific stuff (the Super I/O chip, chipset GPIOs, other peripherals, etc.). Using coreboot as an example, Intel provides the Firmware Support Package blob to handle platform initialization. I think AGESA is somewhat similar to this, though Intel publicly releases the binaries for use in coreboot/etc. Thanks to the FSP, coreboot has support for recent Intel chipsets. However, there is only support for two recent consumer boards: the MSI PRO Z690-A WiFi DDR4 and DDR5.