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Joanna Rutkowska's blog points to recent paper on a survey of the various problems and attacks presented against the x86 platform over the last 10 years. The paper does not present new exploits but does cover: the BIOS (UEFI) and booting; peripherals; the Intel Management Engine; and several other aspects of x86 insecurity. Some of the problems appear insurmountable as described.
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Remember Darwin; building a better mousetrap merely results in smarter mice.
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Friday October 30 2015, @11:40PM
There were technical justifications for why ACPI won over flattened device tree, specifically because FDT is a descriptive only environment. A properly coded ACPI table allows a LOT of hardware to just work without individually written drives. Most fan systems are controlled by a I2C chip. Withotu ACPI, you'd need to know where the I2C chip is on the system bus, a specific driver for said chip, and then a driver for fan control. With ACPI, you can define the standard fan control methods and it "just works".
I'm not saying ACPI is genius, but if you're dealing with a vendor who actually tests their ACPI implementation against something that isn't just Windows, and follows the spec, you'd be amazed on how Linux can "just work" for the most part. A lot of the enablement of Linux for x86 laptops on an OEM side is mostly fixing the ACPI tables, and then making sure the right firmware is cooked in.
Still always moving