UEFI Secure Boot with the Raspberry Pi
Secure Boot
© Lead Image © esom3110, 123RF.com
Strictly speaking, the Raspberry Pi family does not support either UEFI or Secure Boot. However, with a few tricks, implementation is still possible.
Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) [1] can be installed on older Raspberry Pi models, which was covered in a previous issue [2]. This lets you access the System Management BIOS and simplifies the use of the GRUB bootloader you know from the PC world. UEFI also provides a Secure Boot feature that prevents loading of unauthorized kernels or drivers/modules. This article shows you how to add Secure Boot.
Including its predecessor EFI, the BIOS successor UEFI is already more than 20 years old. I had my first experiences with UEFI on Unix mainframes. Back then, the PC world was still dominated by the good old BIOS, but it was quite insecure and easy to infiltrate. Also, classic BIOS did not cope well with the ever-increasing size of storage media.
UEFI promised to solve the problems, but initially went largely unnoticed, until its profile suddenly rose sharply around 2012, when Microsoft imposed a new requirement on hardware manufacturers in the context of certification for the upcoming Windows 8. Microsoft only wanted to certify machines that supported UEFI Secure Boot [3].
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