Coreboot Support For Intel TXT Is Being Brought Up

In addition to measured boot support being worked on for Coreboot to enhance the security of this open-source BIOS/firmware replacement, support for working with Intel TXT - Trusted Execution Technology - is also happening.

Philipp Deppenwiese shared that at 9elements Cyber Security they are now working on getting Coreboot running with Intel Trusted Execution Technology (TXT) paired with the LinuxBoot systemd boot-loader for launching a Tboot hypervisor. The work is coming together nicely it appears and they will be upstreaming this support when ready.

Intel TXT has been around for a while now and supported by several generations of Intel CPUs for allowing authenticity checks of a platform/OS, ensuring that the OS starts in a trusted environment, and yields related security benefits for fending off potential system/BIOS-level exploits including within virtualized environments.

The developers are using Coreboot with Intel TXT on the Open Compute Project's Wedge100S data center switches at this stage but once upstreamed can be relevant to other platforms supporting TXT.

Confirmation of this Intel TXT milestone for Coreboot was shared on Twitter by Deppenwiese.