The UEFI Forum today announced the release of the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) 2.11 specification and the Platform Initialization (PI) 1.9 specification. The goal of these specification updates is to streamline user implementation by providing increased compatibility across hardware architectures, including security updates, algorithm support and improving alignment implementation guidance.

"We have created a vibrant firmware community, and these specification updates provide maintenance and enhancement of fundamental capabilities in order to help increase the momentum of the UEFI specifications and add value to the ecosystem," said Mark Doran, UEFI Forum President. "The latest specifications continue the UEFI Forum's commitment to developing standards for all significant CPU architectures as underscored by additions such as the new LoongArch support in the PI 1.9 specification."

The UEFI Forum today announced the release of the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) 2.10 specification and Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) 6.5 specification. The new specification versions expand support for new processor types, memory interfaces and platform types, while allowing for crypto agility in post-quantum system security.

"We are excited to share the new Conformance Profiles feature, responsive to community pull for a way to make the UEFI Forum's work useful," said Mark Doran, UEFI Forum President. "The Conformance Profiles feature will expand the platform types UEFI can support to an ever wider range of platform types like IoT, embedded and automotive spaces - beyond general purpose computers."

Cavium, Inc., a leading provider of semiconductor products that enable intelligent processing for enterprise, data center, cloud, wired and wireless networking, today announced the introduction of a new game changing category of processors that are workload optimized for a range of applications in the cloud and data center. The 2.5GHz 48 core ThunderX is the world's highest performing low-power 64-bit ARMv8 SoC family of workload optimized processors with a range of SKUs and form factors for high performance volume compute, storage, secure compute and networking specific workloads.

Data center infrastructure transformation is one of the key trends driving IT spending in 2014 and beyond. Analysts predict that the global data center infrastructure market, including servers, storage, networking, security and virtualization, will reach $128 billion in 2014. Key trends driving this disruption include rapid adoption of Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) enabled by Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) with virtualized on demand compute, Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Software Defined Storage (SDS). The continued growth and adoption of Open Source Software with almost 100 billion lines of code and nearly 10 million active developers is also radically changing installed base software requirements.

The UEFI Forum has ratified an update to the UEFI 2.3.1 Specification that adds important firmware considerations and addresses numerous engineering change requests. The updated Specification will be referred to as "UEFI 2.3.1C".

• UEFI 2.3.1C adds: An OS Indications Variable - OS/FW feature & capability communication - when implemented, allows end-users to make an OS menu request to enter BIOS setup after next reboot.
• UEFI 2.3.1C adds: A mechanism which, when implemented, facilitates Open Source Operating System installations and OS- agnostic end-user configurations of retaining the factory default keys while in Setup Mode (see Specification for full technical detail of Setup Mode).
• UEFI 2.3.1C removes: Runtime driver requirement on Network UNDI drivers - this allows UNDI drivers to be delivered in EFI Byte Code (EBC) Virtual Machine format supporting systems based on different processor architectures.

We have brought you the potential perils of the upcoming UEFI Forum-implemented - www.uefi.org - Windows 8 secure boot feature here, here and here. However, it appears that it may not be so 'secure' after all, since there appears to be a surefire way to circumvent it, at least for the moment, while it's in development.

Softpedia has scored an exclusive interview with security researcher Peter Kleissner, who has created various Windows (XP, Server 2003 etc) "bootkits", which allow OS infection at the highest privilege level, giving unrestricted access to the whole of the PC. His latest one, called Stoned Lite, shows how the Windows 8 secure boot process, still in development, can be subverted, as it stands. He is planning to release details of how the code works at the upcoming International Malware Conference (MalCon) - malcon.org - that will take place in India on November 25th. It appears that the real vulnerability exists in the legacy BIOS boot procedure, not in Microsoft's implementation of secure boot, as Kleissner said:

The problem with the legacy startup is that no one verifies the MBR, which makes it the vulnerable point. With UEFI and secure boot, all the boot applications and drivers have to be signed (otherwise they won't be loaded). You can compare it to TPM, although Arie van der Hoeven from Microsoft announced that the secure boot feature is mandatory for OEMs who want to be UEFI certified. It is a good message that security is not an option.