New UEFI Secure Boot Vulnerability

Details of the Vulnerability

Details have emerged about a now-patched security vulnerability that could allow a bypass of the Secure Boot mechanism in Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) systems.

The Vulnerability

The vulnerability, assigned the CVE identifier CVE-2024-7344 (CVSS score: 6.7), resides in a UEFI application signed by Microsoft’s "Microsoft Corporation UEFI CA 2011" third-party UEFI certificate, according to a new report from E…

Exploitation Methods

Applying UEFI revocations, managing access to files located on the EFI system partition, Secure Boot customization, and remote attestation with a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) are some of the other ways of protecting against exploitation of unknown vulnerable signed UEFI bootloaders and deployment of UEFI bootkits.

Expert Insights

"The number of UEFI vulnerabilities discovered in recent years and the failures in patching them or revoking vulnerable binaries within a reasonable time window shows that even such an essential feature as UEFI Secure Boot should not be considered an impenetrable barrier," Smolár said.

Concerns and Implications

"However, what concerns us the most with respect to the vulnerability is not the time it took to fix and revoke the binary, which was quite good compared to similar cases, but the fact that this isn’t the first time that such an obviously unsafe signed UEFI binary has been discovered. This raises questions of how common the use of such unsafe techniques is among third-party UEFI software vendors, and how many other similar obscure, but signed, bootloaders there might be out there."

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