Debian Making Progress On UEFI SecureBoot Support In 2018

UEFI SecureBoot support didn't make it for Debian 9.0 "Stretch" but progress is now being made on this "security" feature and it's looking like it could be squared away for the Debian 10.0 release expected next year.

While most major Linux distributions have been supporting UEFI SecureBoot for years, Debian has been a bit behind the ball in supporting this controversial but widely used technology for effectively signing the boot process and brought on by the likes of Microsoft in the name of improving system security.

Fortunately, Debian developers and other stakeholders just finished up a development sprint in Germany for working on the support. They have been figuring out the requirements for the signing process, how to integrate it into the build process, and they started working on the support for the kernel, Dak, fwupdate, shim, and GRUB.

More details on this latest result of the UEFI SecureBoot Debian sprint can be found via this mailing list post. There is also background Debian + UEFI SecureBoot details via the Debian Wiki.

Hopefully this UEFI SecureBoot will all be squared away in time for next year's Debian 10 "Buster" release, which should be out by the middle of 2019.