10 ms·
This is actually a pretty nice pro-consumer feature as this makes it trivial to lie to Windows that secure boot is enabled while hooking things. Great for game
by arsome 4y ago
This is actually a pretty nice pro-consumer feature as this makes it trivial to lie to Windows that secure boot is enabled while hooking things.
Great for game cheat developers for example, who often want very deep hooks on the system to bypass anti-cheat tooling and with some modern games requiring secure boot to be enabled, this could provide an interesting alternative strategy.
- gjsman-1000 4y agoI am shocked that Windows isn't using a TPM Measurement for verification, as the TPM can be used to prove that Secure Boot was enabled. Instead... Windows just seems happy trusting the UEFI and letting any apps that want to ask the TPM. Which... why? I mean, I suppose it's a holdover from Windows 10 where Secure Boot existed without TPM but there's no reason in Windows 11 where both should be present.
- helloooooooo 4y agoWindows does do that, it’s called Secure Launch. It uses DRTM and SRTM for remote attestation to prove to remote machines that the OS booted in a well known state. The biggest problem is that there is such a modge podge of hardware and firmware to measure, that the only real use of it is in corporate environments where the hardware deployed is fairly homogenous.
- joerichey 4y agoI looked into this on my motherboard, and the issue is that MSI's firmware measures in the TPM events saying "Secure Boot is On", even when it is in this insecure mode. This means that even if Windows "checks" (via measured boot) that Secure Boot is on, they are still being lied to by the motherboard firmware.
- mjg59 4y agoPCR 7 doesn't just indicate whether secure boot was enabled, it also contains information about which certificates were used to boot. Obviously if you'll happily sign something unsigned the unsigned thing can just fake a measurement that contains the expected certificate, but I'd be interested to see what the event log looks like on one of these systems when it boots an unsigned binary.
- amluto 4y agoWhat exactly is Windows supposed to verify? There isn’t a standard PCR with some standard value indicating that a certain image was booted. DRTM is a credible (sort of) alternative, but at that point Secure Boot isn’t really necessary — the whole point of DRTM is that you verify the current state of the system, not how it got there.
- mjg59 4y ago> There isn’t a standard PCR with some standard value indicating that a certain image was booted. No, but there is a standard PCR with a standard value indicating that a certain certificate was used to sign what was booted, and Windows is signed with its own certificate rather than the third party UEFI CA one.
- amluto 4y agoNice, so MS gets better TPM-based assurance than anyone else.
- raxxorraxor 4y agoIf MSI keeps this feature, I would probably buy their boards. I don't get the love for trusted computing, it can have severe negative effects if you look beyond the direct effects of validating your system OS. It can lock down free and open computing and this is far greater than the threat by trojans that I didn't have in the last 20 years. Since Windows will force secure boot, this is a very welcome convenience feature.
- prmoustache 4y agoIt is in no way different than all other motherboards laptops. They all allow you to disable secure-boot.
- raxxorraxor 4y agoAs I understand it, it simulates secure boot being enabled. This is handy for the OS that try to enforce it. It is not too hard to see that some kind of software will also try to enforce it. Mechanisms like remote attestation are pretty hostile in my opinion. This is about control for me, not about sensible security.
- g_p 4y agoIf you really wanted to verify that secure boot was enabled, and that a user wasn't doing "funky things", you'd need to also check for a TPM attestation, as you allude to - this isn't really simulating a whole lot from a security perspective. You can fairly easily "spoof" secure boot being enabled on a non-secure-boot system, since effectively you are exposing a 1 instead of a 0 (and with secure boot off, can hook whatever you need to). Admittedly, having a button in the UEFI menu is more convenient for an end user though. If you have a TPM attestation of the device state, PCR 7 is sealed around the secure boot state, and that would be more interesting for someone trying to lock someone in. As you say, if your TPM is then being used to attest that the system is unmodified, then that is pretty user hostile. For a regular normal non-technical user though, having some "sane defaults" arguably makes sense - if we raise the bar on compromising a regular person's computer by a few notches (i.e. you can't just replace the bootloader with a keylogger and chain-load the regular bootloader), it can help with platform security. The problem is that, on top of that platform, end users run all kinds of (what we'd previously call) spyware/adware, which just sends their data off the system. When this "non-technical user protection" starts to get in the way of expert users, that's when it becomes more of a problem for being in control of your own system.
- smileybarry 4y agoIt will just lead to multiplayer games locking out all of these motherboards until they update their BIOS to fix this default, market share be damned. Valorant had no problems locking out Windows 11 users with Secure Boot disabled.