Microsoft’s Secure Boot has had a serious vulnerability for most of its existence.

An industry-wide standard Microsoft invented to protect Windows, and later Linux, devices from firmware infections has been trivial to bypass for 13 of its 14 years of existence. The discovery was made by researchers at security firm ESET after identifying 11 firmware images, at least one from 2013, that were known to be defective but remained signed by the software company anyway.

The images are known as shims, which were invented to extend Secure Boot to Linux devices and utility software. Using a technique simple enough to be performed by novice hackers, these old, forgotten shims can be used to completely circumvent the protection, which is embedded into the UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) of the device’s motherboard. The gaffe is the result of the failure by Microsoft, which oversees the signing of shims, to revoke the publicly available images once vulnerabilities were found in them.

An anonymous security researcher called “Nightmare Eclipse” has been publishing a series of significant security exploits against Microsoft Windows—including one that breaks BitLocker. Microsoft has threatened legal action against the researcher. Lots of recriminations are being traded back and forth.

ProPublica has a scoop:

In late 2024, the federal government’s cybersecurity evaluators rendered a troubling verdict on one of Microsoft’s biggest cloud computing offerings.

The tech giant’s “lack of proper detailed security documentation” left reviewers with a “lack of confidence in assessing the system’s overall security posture,” according to an internal government report reviewed by ProPublica.

Or, as one member of the team put it: “The package is a pile of shit.”

For years, reviewers said, Microsoft had tried and failed to fully explain how it protects sensitive information in the cloud as it hops from server to server across the digital terrain. Given that and other unknowns, government experts couldn’t vouch for the technology’s security.

[…]

The federal government could be further exposed if it couldn’t verify the cybersecurity of Microsoft’s Government Community Cloud High, a suite of cloud-based services intended to safeguard some of the nation’s most sensitive information.

Yet, in a highly unusual move that still reverberates across Washington, the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, or FedRAMP, authorized the product anyway, bestowing what amounts to the federal government’s cybersecurity seal of approval. FedRAMP’s ruling—which included a kind of “buyer beware” notice to any federal agency considering GCC High—helped Microsoft expand a government business empire worth billions of dollars.