Researchers disclose a 55-year-old vulnerability affecting macOS, Windows and Linux. Exploitation is trivial and requires no special tools. No patch exists.
This does however make me wonder if it’s possible to interact with a Linux system without first logging in. Some bootloaders have a shell and I think there’s also a UEFI shell? No idea what they are capable of, though.
Not directly. UEFI itself only supports mounting a minimal set of filesystems. That’s why your EFI system partitiion needs to be FAT32, for example, and why the kernel and initial ramdisk are also located there. UEFI mounts the ESP and executes the bootloader, which then loads the kernel (located at ESP/vmlinuz-linux on Arch) and initial ramdisk (ESP/initramfs-linux.img) into memory. The initial ramdisk is a compressed image of an early root filesystem that contains the tools and drivers necessary to boot the full system, including the filesystem drivers for ext4/btrfs/whatever.
You could build an EFI program that natively supports different filesystems, though.
This does however make me wonder if it’s possible to interact with a Linux system without first logging in. Some bootloaders have a shell and I think there’s also a UEFI shell? No idea what they are capable of, though.
Not directly. UEFI itself only supports mounting a minimal set of filesystems. That’s why your EFI system partitiion needs to be FAT32, for example, and why the kernel and initial ramdisk are also located there. UEFI mounts the ESP and executes the bootloader, which then loads the kernel (located at
ESP/vmlinuz-linuxon Arch) and initial ramdisk (ESP/initramfs-linux.img) into memory. The initial ramdisk is a compressed image of an early root filesystem that contains the tools and drivers necessary to boot the full system, including the filesystem drivers for ext4/btrfs/whatever.You could build an EFI program that natively supports different filesystems, though.
I mean you can easily edit grub at boot and boot straight into single user mode without logging in.