Replace Your Exploit-Ridden Firmware with Linux - Ronald Minnich, Google

Replace Your Exploit-Ridden Firmware with Linux - Ronald Minnich, Google

With the WikiLeaks release of the vault7 material, the security of the UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) firmware used in most PCs and laptops is once again a concern. UEFI is a proprietary and closed-source operating system, with a codebase almost as large as the Linux kernel, that runs when the system is powered on and continues to run after it boots the OS (hence its designation as a “Ring -2 hypervisor"). It is a great place to hide exploits since it never stops running, and these exploits are undetectable by kernels and programs.

Our answer to this is NERF (Non-Extensible Reduced Firmware), an open source software system developed at Google to replace almost all of UEFI firmware with a tiny Linux kernel and initramfs. The initramfs file system contains an init and command line utilities from the u-root project (http://u-root.tk/), which are written in the Go language.

About Ronald G. Minnich
Ron Minnich is a Software Engineer at Google. He has contributed to many open source projects in the last several decades, including the Linux kernel (9p file system); the FreeBSD kernel (rfork); and Plan 9 (many different areas). He directed the team that ported Plan 9 to the Blue Gene supercomputers. He invented LinuxBIOS (now called coreboot) in 1999. He is one of the core contributors to the Harvey operating system. His most recent Linux Foundation talk was on how to build your own signed version of ChromeOS and resign your Chromebook with your personal keys in 2016.