• nyan@lemmy.cafe
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    5 hours ago

    The purpose of a locked boot system is privacy.

    No. Once you strip away all the rhetoric, the purpose of a locked boot system is control (over who or what can boot the system).

    Current secure boot implementations are like a door lock installed by someone else, which you are not allowed to replace and that may or may not allow you to cut your own duplicate keys for it. You have no control whatsoever over who the people who installed the lock may have given keys to, and if it turns out that the lock has a fundamental design flaw that means it can’t do its job properly, well, sucks to be you. You can’t even guarantee that the lock won’t morph into a new shape randomly or under the control of the installer, invalidating your existing keys in the process.

    Rooting a device is a tradeoff. An unreliable door lock that you don’t entirely control may be better than none, but if you know you’re leaving the door unlocked, you also know you need to take other precautions to safeguard what’s inside (or simply not leave anything of value there in the first place).

    The ideal would be a locked boot system that is installed by the user and is fully under their control, but I have yet to encounter one.