Red Hat has announced that the Fedora 18 via a Verisign service of a digital signature wants. So should the Linux-distribution is also able to run on Windows 8 systems that are in uefi will make use of secure boot.
Microsoft wants with Windows 8 secure boot mechanism. Secure boot is available in modern pc’s and laptops with the bios-successor’ uefi. Via the security mechanism would no longer be tampered with bootloaders and drivers. Microsoft claims that Windows 8 on which way is better to protect against malware, because with secure boot only signed code can be rotated. From the Linux community, however, was directly the criticism that this can bring other operating systems threatens to be excluded because they do not have the necessary keys.
Red Hat has to say now found a way to get Fedora 18, which is expected to be in november, it will come true, yet on uefi systems with secure boot start-up. This will pay Red Hat one-time $ 99 to the certificate authority VeriSign so via the Microsoft SysDev portal code to signen with the required signature.
First of all, will Red Hat in Fedora 18 is a first stage boot loader to introduce the necessary keys. This bootloader will not do anything else but Grub2, the normal boot loader, verify it has the correct signature, and then restart. According to Red Hat do the first stage boot loader only occasionally to be updated, but Grub2 will be restrictions. So is it impossible to separate modules to load and can only signed kernels can be initiated.
Red Hat promises that the all of the Fedora 18 binaries of the correct signature will go with, already let the company also know that the drivers of third parties could not support the signing process. A good solution to this problem is not there yet, says Red Hat.
According to Red Hat, is the chosen method to secure boot support, although far from optimal, but was the least problematic. So would the creation of an organization that is a generic Linux key would be to manage to be expensive and time consuming. Also start their own Red Hat-authority has met with various objections and would be contrary to the open-source nature of Linux.
Red Hat says that all of the above limitations of secure boot will expire if the user has the ability to place the safety mechanism in the uefi off manually. This will be x86-based systems to be the case, promises Microsoft, but on ARM hardware such as Windows 8 tablets, secure boot not correctly disabled.