Technology

I meant BIOS is way more limited in scope than UEFI and that's a good thing.

Although since the limitation was most likely due to hardware of the day, i don't know how would a modern BIOS look like.

Don't know, been rolling with Gentoo for some time now.

I wouldn't trust "out of the box" support anyway as that would imply trusting microsoft keys.

It is a good thing!

because they associate it with locking your PC to only running windows.

They're not exactly wrong. BIOS/UEFI bugs that make it a royal pain to use secure boot with anything but Windows are pretty common.

I associate it with the fight I've had every single time I tried to use it. It's never been a smooth process on any server I attempted to use it on. Usually I either run into problems with a system not wanting to properly boot the memory stick even with a full UEFI image flashed to it, or if I do get that to work I go through the whole installation process only to find the system unbootable for whatever reason. Eventually I just give up and do a standard installation because why should I have to work this hard to put an OS on a machine?

The Fedora doc on this is a bit old but it's still mostly the same:

Secure boot activates a lock-down mode in the Linux kernel which disables various features kernel functionality:

• Loading kernel modules that are not signed by a trusted key.
• Using kexec to load an unsigned kernel image.
• Hibernation and resume from hibernation.
• User-space access to physical memory and I/O ports.
• Module parameters that allow setting memory and I/O port addresses.
• Writing to MSRs through /dev/cpu/*/msr.
• Use of custom ACPI methods and tables.

The implementation of secure boot is still questionable to this day, but it is understandable that it doesn't always play nice with Linux. I do believe you can use hibernate now as long as you have an encrypted swap (LUKS).

I can definitely see the pain if you happen to be a kernel dev or use linux on any SBC with IO ports you want to mess with in userspace and not make en entire overkill kernel module for.

Yea, I guess that initial total lack of understanding and big headlines has left a long-lasting scar. Admittedly, secure boot could be used to lock a machine down if the ability to turn it off and/or manage the keys yourself was removed.

We'll get there, eventually :)

Never mind the fact that basically every big Linux distro plays nicely with secure boot these days, and has for a while now.

In my experience nicely is still pretty relative. It still seems to be the most common area things go wrong on my installs and place I have the hardest time working around...

and the bigger part, it's a solution to a problem that I've never seen happen in the wild, and really can't fathom happening on linux that doesn't involve a very dumb user running software from an unknown source as root.

Yes, failing to safeguard keys is fatal, but that applies to everything. But if fs you're storing keys on is behind luks and they're readable by root only - you're as safe enough. There're also LSMs like selinux that can increase the complexity of attack.

I don't know about nitrokey specifically, but TPM is an option (not good enough, imo) and a simple luks encrypted usb. You could get some convenience by storing the key to unlock it somewhere on the encrypted root.

In general - you cannot stop a targeted attack no matter what, but staying safe from all the automated ones is doable.