Microsoft addresses Windows 8 secure boot issue

From CNET News.com: Microsoft is trying to shed light on the new secure boot process in Windows 8 to address concerns from people who may want to dual-boot a non-Windows OS, such as Linux.

In an update posted Thursday to the Building Windows 8 blog , Tony Mangefeste, a member of Microsoft's Ecosystem team, discussed how secure boot attempts to protect the PC against boot loader attacks, which can compromise a system before the OS even loads.

Secure boot is actually a feature of Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI), a new type of boot environment that has gradually been replacing the standard BIOS process. As Mangefeste explained, Windows 8 taps into UEFI's secure boot to ensure that the pre-OS environment is safe and secure.

The concern raised by some--in particular, Matthew Garrett, a Linux developer at Red Hat--is that the security certificates used by Microsoft to authenticate the boot environment will support only a Microsoft operating system.

"A system that ships with only OEM [original equipment manufacturer] and Microsoft keys will not boot a generic copy of Linux," Garrett said in a blog posted Tuesday.

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