BootHole bug patch in Grub2 causes boot issues in Linux distros – Computer – News

The patches released this week for a bug in the Grub2 boot loader cause problems with various Linux distributions. Some Red Hat, Ubuntu, CentOS, and Debian users report that they can no longer boot their systems.

The problems arose after developers released patches every BootHole vulnerability to remedy. The bug in Grub2 makes devices with Secure Boot vulnerable, although in practice it is difficult to exploit that leak. Because of the leak in Grub2, almost all Linux systems are vulnerable. Developers such as Red Hat and Canonical have released patches after the researchers were notified.

It now seems that those patches do not work equally well everywhere. Among others in Red Hat’s bug tracker, Ubuntu, CentOS, in Debian users complain that their systems are no longer booting. Grub2 is a boot loader that uses Microsoft as its certificate authority. So a bug in that boot loader or misconfigured cryptographic signatures can cause a system to stop working at all. This can differ per system and distribution. It is therefore difficult to say exactly how big the problem is.

In the bug reports, users write that rolling back to a previous version of Grub2 via a bootable iso seems enough to fix the problem. However, they remain vulnerable to the BootHole vulnerability. Disabling Secure Boot could also be a solution.

–