booster VS sbctl

People should stop using plain passwords to protect data and switch to something better.oster/ + Yubikey

Change from mkinitcpio to booster. It's faster and produce smaller images.

Neither, use booster.

Booster is an initramfs - a type of software that runs early during the boot process and helps to setup system, e.g. perform disk unlock, load extra drivers, setup ZFS filesystem, and so on.

I don't have high hopes that this will change in mkinitcpio, but perhaps you could bring it up with booster (which copied the mkinitcpio hooks and removal scripts)

This is my personal preference, but consider switching to booster.

initramfs: booster - TPM2 support, way faster than mkinitcpio, autodiscovering root partition

Note I'm using booster, so assuming you're using the default mkinitcpio you probably want /boot/initramfs-linux.img. Also, don't forget to modify if your ESP isn't mounted at /boot like mine.

Booster initramfs generator supports TPM, Yubikey and Network binding so you can easily protect your data using the strategy you want.

GPT table detection has higher priority at booster code. But for some reason it does not identify your partition table as GPT. Filed a github bug for it https://github.com/anatol/booster/issues/119

No, this isn't true nor correct.

Secure Boot and TPM do offer tangible security benefits and is security features you can take ownership of.

Secure Boot allows your own key hierarchy, and TPM allows you to take ownership.

The linked boot disk isn't really proof that Secure Boot is useless. If you don't set a MOKManager password (as you should), and you change the security state of the machine while present at the keyboard. Yes you can boot things.

This is intended to make sure people can actually decide to trust things. And having insecure defaults makes this less useful. Not very surprising.

TPMs could also prevent attacks like this on your machine.

Incidentally I've invested quite a bit of time in making user-friendly Secure Boot tooling as well. https://github.com/Foxboron/sbctl

No problem! The sbctl package ships with a pretty extensive hook out of the box (https://github.com/Foxboron/sbctl/blob/master/contrib/pacman/ZZ-sbctl.hook). It's been very reliable for automatically resigning .efi executables after updates for me.

sbctl verify returns failed to find EFI system partition despite it definitely is there. It's the same issue as this but remounting or restarting doesn't fix it.

lol

Must actually prevent unsigned images from booting

sudo dnf install asciidoc golang -y VERSION=0.11 cd /tmp curl -L "https://github.com/Foxboron/sbctl/releases/download/${VERSION}/sbctl-${VERSION}.tar.gz" | tar zxvf - cd "sbctl-${VERSION}" make sudo make install cd ~

By far the easiest is to use sbctl to generate, install and use keys to sign your efi images. You can use mkinitcpio to build the unified kernels automatically and a pacman trigger to rerun the sbctl signing when the kernel is updated. Pretty straightforward (once you've done it once).

The question is whether you have any UEFI drivers or not. If they're in the ESP you can just look there to check, but UEFI drivers can also be loaded from PCI cards or baked in the firmware itself.

If you're using a TPM for Secure Boot, you can use the command in https://github.com/Foxboron/sbctl/wiki/FAQ#option-rom to know for sure.