This may sound like a movie-plot threat in 2020, but perhaps in 2026 it’s less unlikely?
There’s also the theft scenario, as indicated in the article, or the supply chain attack scenario. I don’t know how feasible it would be for a buyer to validate the integrity of the hardware they just racked up if they can’t trust secure boot?
The chaining to get something like this to work is pretty up there.
especially in free/open source software like edk2
And unlike BIOS which is relatively small UEFI is "full-fat" almost the size of an operating system itself. It can even run its own applications.
The 1 million lines of C code comprising UEFI are riddled with bugs and this is just one of them. No doubt LLMs will be able to uncover a lot more of them.
Yes it does? If anything, it provides way more; a .efi program can use firmware services to load files and print text. There's like 80% of a DOS in there.
> Most operating system don't use BIOS or any other software layer and configure the hardware themselves. Why is it there then?
Because we still want enough functionality to load the OS in the first place, which means e.g. nvme drivers, Ethernet drivers (for netboot), keyboard input and some display output (to let a user pick what to load), and of course filesystem drivers because loading an OS/bootloader from a single shared MBR was awful.
I'm not really sure what this means. UEFI provides a consistent interface to access storage devices, network devices, input devices, and access to a framebuffer. How else would bootloaders work?
Which is something that happens inside a trust boundary. After all, if an untrusted third party gets to install your OS it's game over, UEFI bug or not.
And consumer devices often don't have a network card - or come with PXE disabled in the BIOS.
This gives the attacker access at the UEFI level and above -- they can use it to produce false attestations.
PS your profile links a blog that says you moved
Those original PHP 10s were negotiated down into a 9.2 by disclosure.. so maybe this'll be an 8.7 soon.
> Specific configurations should not impact any attribute contributing to the CVSS Base metric assessment , i.e., if a specific configuration is required for an attack to succeed, the vulnerable system should be assessed assuming it is in that configuration. [1]
For a vulnerability to score a 10 its Attack Complexity must be 'Low' (broadly speaking: it doesn't require target-specific customizations or mitigations [1]), which isn't the case with php2shell.
Here's a breakdown of that 9.2: https://www.first.org/cvss/calculator/4.0#CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:H...
[1] https://www.first.org/cvss/v4.0/specification-document#Attac...
Even before AI, there was prestige in being able to say that you (or your team) found a 9.2 in some major piece of software. You could put that on your resume in some specializations.
Now with AI vulnerability scanning being so hyper-commercialized (but not yet fully commoditized), this is cranked way up since there are more monied interests involved, and many of them are probably trying to make a quick buck before LLM-based vulnerability scans are a commodity (for better or worse).
personally never found a reason why to include icmp in there for what i was building using edk2.
as others noted pxe is also already very fragile and enough network access to perform the icmp attack is likely enough access to mitm the entire pxe run and slap in your own boot image or modules etc.
i dont think most servers boot using PXE so that is grossly overstated? or would it include the attacker going into the boot menu and selecting to pxe boot... because why use an exploit then if you can just point it to your own server and again pull the image like that.
all u need is a konboot or similar tool inserted to then subsequently load the original image -_-
Instead, it applies only to organizations with machines that boot from local networks, or conceivably from Internet-connected resources.
Who is PXE-booting over the open Internet!?
[1] https://tinfoil.sh/blog/2026-10-25-less-is-more
The unix philosophy prevails!
Dependencies are.
Part of that is reading bits and pieces of what Nancy Leveson had to say about the subject. Subsystems even when working to spec can produce spectacular failures.
So the solutions need to be structural.
e.g. relative to a monolith kernel, seL4 is small, has no known bugs (AI can try, but so far crickets) and is the only piece that needs to run privileged.
Everything running under seL4 benefits from the guarantees seL4 provides.
We need a clean start. A lot of layers can and should be rebuilt, and even if you do it without reducing functionality, I feel like in a lot of cases like we’ll be able to cut down the code significantly.
When I explain software bloat to non technical people, I say imagine you built a 10 story building, but every few years it was a story at a time with the renovations along the way.
Like there’s gonna be a lot of inefficiencies. Yea I know we refactor. But doing a clean slate rebuild. Knowing exactly what you need based on real world experience, it should work to really streamline stuff.