PureBoot, the High Security Boot Process
My knee-jerk reaction to this project is that it would be overall inferior to simply allowing coreboot to measure and boot the user's desired Linux distribution directly, and vastly inferior to a small first-stage bootloader written in a safer language than C. I still think that's mostly true - at the end of the day, you're introducing a second Linux distribution to maintain and audit into your bootchain. However, the 33c3 presentation about Heads at least presents a few decent arguments for using Linux : https://trmm.net/Heads_33c3#Philosophy_of_Heads .Fundamentally I'm not sure I agree with the concept that Linux could be more robust, secure, audited, or hardened than an open-source miniaturized early stage bootloader audited by a good security research firm. I think the dated "more eyes makes more more secure software" concept has been fairly debunked at this stage and the path towards security will revolve around smaller trusted components written in a memory-safe language (i.e. not C).