sbctl VS heads

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.

I downloaded the VGA ROM for my Thinkpad W530 for both the Intel IGPU and Nvidia Quadro K1000M using this and configured the build config to use them with the correct PCI ports (8086,0166 10de,0ffc). Everything works fine except the output for both the VGA and the mini DP port. Does anyone have any ideas of what I could be missing here?

You may be interested in Heads, which is available on Purism laptops under the name PureBoot. Though this really needs a coreboot-capable machine, I think, and isn't something you can just add to your existing UEFI boot chain.

You don't need to encrypt anything to verify those images, you just need to sign them. See how Heads does this.

https://github.com/osresearch/heads

Unfortunately there is also the Heads secure firmware: https://osresearch.net/ as well. Otherwise my vote would go to Heads. Liive OS could be pretty hard to optimize in a search engine, they'll think it's misspelled. Could call it "Miles" and just never ack the reference...

Heads, https://osresearch.net/

If you worried about malicious changes, there is the write lock protection feature in coreboot that prevents internal flashing. This would require you to flash externally whenever you want to update coreboot. If worried someone will also flash your BIOS externally, you may want to look into Heads