The creator of systemd (Lennart Poettering) has recently created a new company dedicated to bringing hardware attestation to open source software.
What might this entail? A previous blog post could provide some clues:
So, let’s see how I would build a desktop OS. The trust chain matters, from the boot loader all the way to the apps. This means all code that is run must be cryptographically validated before it is run. This is in fact where big distributions currently fail pretty badly. This is a fault of current Linux distributions though, not of SecureBoot in general.
If this technology is successful, the end result could be that we would see our Linux laptops one day being as locked down as an Iphone or Android device.
There are lots of others who are equally concerned about this possibility: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46784572
An alternative to secureboot that isn’t secureboot but behaves like it. Wonderful 🙄
Another Poettering “masterpiece” ready to be gobbled up by his fanbase who will flock towards the new and shiny toy that forgoes the things that actually work fine or aren’t solving an actual problem with 99% of whatever it’s used by. Great 🙄 🙄 🙄
EDIT:
No doubt this will be his opportunity to force everyone off grub and use systemd as the bootloader across major distros. As valid as it may be to succeed grub, surely systemd is not the answer to this.