Open Source Summit North America 2017
September 11-14, 2017 – Los Angeles, CA
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.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/open-hardware-servers-step-forward-jean-marie-verdun
Click to access Denver_2017_coreboot_u-root.pdf
https://linuxfr.org/news/un-pas-en-avant-pour-les-serveurs-libres-le-projet-nerf
Firmware Security 