On Tue, Apr 5, 2022 at 3:08 PM Jared Dominguez jaredz@redhat.com wrote:
The security of UEFI systems is immeasurably better. Standardized firmware updates, support for modern secure TPMs, OS protection from firmware (SMM mitigations), HTTP(S) boot support, largely shared and open sourced firmware codebases that aren't a pile of assembly code, and a lot of other features are UEFI-only.
When users have a suboptimal experience by default, it makes Fedora look bad. We can't have security concerns overriding all other concerns. But it's really pernicious to simultaneously say security is important, but we're also not going to sign proprietary drivers. This highly incentivizes the user to disable Secure Boot because that's so much easier than users signing kernel modules and enrolling keys with the firmware, and therefore makes the user *less safe*.
And the amount of resistance to improving UEFI experience for hardware is amazingly awful. The workstation working group has tried to figure out ways to improve the experience, only to be simultaneously stymied by the UEFI firmware management tools and unwillingness by anyone involved to even consider that we should make this better.
Which tools? What specific efforts have been stymied? How is any of this specific to UEFI versus trying to deal with things that aren't supported by someone?
Namely, Fedora signing NVIDIA's proprietary driver.
Apple and Microsoft signing NVIDIA's proprietary driver doesn't at all indicate Apple and Microsoft trust the driver itself. It is trusting the providence of the blob, in order to achieve an overall safer ecosystem for their users.
We either want users with NVIDIA hardware to be inside the Secure Boot fold or we don't. I want them in the fold *despite* the driver that needs signing is proprietary. That's a better user experience across the board, including the security messaging is made consistent. The existing policy serves no good at all and is double talk. If we really care about security more than ideological worry, we'd sign the driver.