sbctl VS Super-UEFIinSecureBoot-Disk

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.

You can edit UEFI drivers from the operating system's bootloader, and you can even flash the UEFI itself from the OS in most computers. While secure boot. Failing that, you can shim a preloader between the bootloader and the UEFI and load arbitrary drivers despite secure boot, like is done here : https://github.com/ValdikSS/Super-UEFIinSecureBoot-Disk

Any sufficiently motivated attacker can make a UEFI rootkit happen, and it's in the wild right now. TPM really do offer no protection to users, either against userspace malware, or rootkits. It's purely about DRM.

Badabing badaboom

I was able to get around this by using a signed grub bootloader instead. What I did was modify a minimal grub disk from here to point to my manjaro installation using the partition uuid in its grub config. Its basically used to bypass secure boot and chainload the default unsigned grub2 which will start the system.

Try this if you want FreeBSD on a Secure Boot PC. I do this on my work PC.

This project works pretty good getting around the forced secure boot with the VCS: https://github.com/ValdikSS/Super-UEFIinSecureBoot-Disk