Canonical and Red Hat have issued a joint statement
regarding Microsoft’s plan to make UEFI Secure Boot a requirement of
Windows 8. Simultaneously, The Linux Foundation has issued a similar statement.
We first covered this issue in September.
The joint Red Hat and Canonical statement opens with an assessment of the situation:
The
UEFI specification for secure boot does not define who controls the
boot restrictions on UEFI platforms, leaving the platform implementer in
control of the exact security model. Unfortunately, Microsoft’s
recommended implementation of secure boot removes control of the system
from the hardware owner, and may prevent open source operating systems
from functioning. The Windows 8 requirement for secure boot will
pressure OEMs to implement secure boot in this fashion.
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