I’ve seen people advocating for both options, but since I’m still new to Linux I’m not sure what to do. I’m currently installing Mint on my laptop to try it out, and I’m not sure if I should enable secure boot or not.
Simply: Do the protections against someone taking your computer and installing a malicious program before/as your OS, or a program that has attained root on your machine and installs itself before/as your OS, matter enough to you to justify the increased risk of being locked out of your machine and the effort to set it up and understand it.
If you don’t understand and don’t want to put in the effort to, then my advice would be to leave it off. Its simple, and the likelihood it saves you is probably very miniscule.
Short answer: off
Long answer: If you won’t use your system for gaming (or anything requiring third-party drivers) and trust Microsoft to not fuck up and will also encrypt your disc, then Secure Boot makes you safer. Otherwise it just causes trouble.
You can also create your own certs.
Secure boot has always caused me headaches in the past.
If you want the extra security, go for it. If you don’t care, turn it off.
I use Linux Mint and I disabled it because it was blocking the nvidia driver from initiating. I’m sure I could fix it, but can’t be arsed to.
Yeah not sure how it works on Mint, on OpenSUSE after reboot it asks if you want to enroll the new keys into it. If you miss the timer you will boot and driver will bork
As always, the answer is “depends”. It shouldn’t hurt unless you’re dual-booting windows (they used it last year as a weapon in their “mess up grub” game), but, Imo, it’s worth the trouble if:
- your data is also encrypted – otherwise one just removes the HDD/SSD and reads what they need;
- you provision your own keys – to not depend on Microsoft signing shims for you;
- you delete the already provisioned keys – Microsoft signed a few vulnerable things, like one kaspersky’s (iirc) live CD with grub not locked down, so one can boot up literally anything anyway;
- you lock down grub or whatever bootloader you’re using – otherwise you become that vulnerable live cd;
- you password lock the uefi – otherwise one can simply disable the secureboot;
- your vendor’s implementation isn’t terribly buggy – iirc, some MSI laptops would just ignore all the discrepancies.
So, a lot of ifs, and a necessity to store the uefi password somewhere safe, as those may be a pita to reset.
As for standalone stuff – idk, it might protect you from malware injecting itself into the bootloader or something, but given there’s likely no chain of trust (I.e. the bootloader doesn’t check what it bootloads), it can move in on some later step.
If you’re not actually going to be engaging in securing anything with it, just leave it off to avoid issues.
Linux supports secure boot so if a distro supports it it’s worth using it.
Linux can use a key signed by Microsoft in a preboot loader and then itself perform its own key authentications for all other processes and software (a shim), forming a secure chain from the BIOS up during boot. You dont have to play with creating your own keys.
So if your OS supports secure boot it is worth using it for added security at boot. Its far from perfect in this set up (as there are plenty of windows OS that also have permission to boot) but it is better than a free for all without it even if the risk is low for most desktop users.
You can go further and generate your own keys and use secure boot and TPM together to lock down the system further but you dont have to to get some benefits from secure boot.
Secure boot is a good thing. It’s a security feature. You want it on whenever possible, unless it’s a huge trouble (like if you have to start manually signing your own keys and adding them to the bios).
Edit: added the word manually
It’s a layer of security. Keep it on when you can. If you have issues doing something, then turn it off (and see if you can turn it back on afterward).
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FDE
Use it with TPM and fscrypt as a second layer.
I was looking for an official documentation entry on this matter to share with OP, ideally something centralized like Fedora’s RPM Fusion or the comprehensive Arch Wiki. While I found various user-created resources, I was surprised not to locate a centralized official documentation page addressing this topic. I’m quite familiar with Linux Mint’s user-friendly approach, so perhaps I’ve overlooked something? I’d be genuinely delighted if someone could point me to such a resource, as it would be tremendously helpful not just for OP but for the community as a whole.
Debian has a good page on it and how their set up works:
https://wiki.debian.org/SecureBoot
Edit: Ubuntu is derived from Debian and then Mint from Ubuntu, but they may have their own differing approachsnto secure boot.
Its main purpose is to prevent malware from booting. In my experience its main purpose seems to be preventing me from booting things I want like ventoy flash drives, nvidia drivers, and Linux distros that don’t support it. Same goes for tpm module. Its main purpose seemed to be the switch keeping win 10 from upgrading. I turned them both off and haven’t felt the strong need to turn them back on yet.
That said, and my bad computing habits aside, you probably should turn them ON. I’m not sure they will do all that much realistically speaking, but if it isn’t getting in your way (and it shouldn’t), then ON isn’t a bad default state to be in.
On!
