Microsoft Responds to Secure Boot Story, Doesn't Address Issue
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 23rd Sep 2011 22:22 UTC, submitted by kragil
Windows The story about how secure boot for Windows 8, part of UEFI, will hinder the use of non-signed binaries and operating systems, like Linux, has registered at Redmond as well. The company posted about it on the Building Windows 8 blog - but didn't take any of the worries away. In fact, Red Hat's Matthew Garrett, who originally broke this story, has some more information - worst of which is that Red Hat has received confirmation from hardware vendors that some of them will not allow you to disable secure boot.
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RE[2]: RSA key example.
by nonoitall on Mon 26th Sep 2011 05:53 UTC in reply to "RE: RSA key example."
nonoitall
Member since:
2011-09-22

Isn't it possible to defeat hash signing by producing a binary which has the same hash, but different code ? After all, the transformation which turns a multi-MB binary into a small, easy to compute and check hash, loses so much information that there's a huge number of possible binaries associated to a given hash.

(It is my understanding that this is what happened with MD5, and is potentially also happening with SHA-1... Breaking hashes this way seems to be purely a matter of time, given that you have some skilled mathematicians at hand)

For cryptographically secure hash algorithms, it's not really feasible time-wise to do this.

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