The Patching Friars' AlmanacA calendar of CVE saints

July 25

PKfailHoly card for pkfail, generated with AI (Claude, Anthropic) for the Lunario dei Frati Patchatori.CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 DO NOT PKfail CLAVIS PROBATIONIS
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☀ Commemorated today: The Miracle of No More Ransom (2016)

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Saint PKfail, Who Signed With the Test Key

Patron of Secure Boot, platform keys, and those who leave in production what was only a test.

Life

In 2024 Binarly revealed PKfail (CVE-2024-8105): a great many computer models from various makers used, as the Secure Boot platform key, test keys supplied by the firmware makers and marked "untrusted, do not use in production." Whoever held the matching private key, which had leaked publicly, could sign malicious bootloaders accepted as trusted. The root of trust rested on a key a sign told you not to use.

Prayer

O Saint PKfail, who signs evil with the free-sample key, teach our firmware to use keys that are truly their own. Amen.

How to celebrate

Celebrated by updating firmware with unique, genuine platform keys and throwing away the test keys left behind by mistake.

A test key in production, a lock for pretend.

Technical record

Disclosed on
July 25 2024
CVE
CVE-2024-8105
CVSS
6.4
Product
Acer · vz2694g

A vulnerability exists in UEFI implementations that use a hard-coded software-based Platform Key (PK). An attacker in possession of the corresponding PK private key can sign arbitrary UEFI executables or firmware components, causing them to be trusted by affected systems and potentially bypassing UEFI Secure Boot trust validation.

Sources: binarly.io

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