Windows 8 will be released with what Microsoft is calling its Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI). The system is designed to be an extra security measure but some people have complained that having UEFI installed also means that being able to dual-boot to another OS on the same PC, such as Linux, would be harder.
A Linux OS provider, Red Hat, announced last week that it has a solution to this issue, saying, "Microsoft will provide keys for Windows and Red Hat will provide keys for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora. Similarly other distributions can participate at a nominal cost of $99 USD - allowing them to register their own keys for distribution to system firmware vendors."
Some Linux users don"t like this idea, but ZDNet.com reports that Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, sees this plan as a good compromise, saying, "I’m certainly not a huge UEFI fan, but at the same time I see why you might want to have signed bootup etc. And if it’s only $99 to get a key for Fedora, I don’t see what the huge deal is.”
Having said that, Torvalds doesn"t believe that UEFI will be as huge of a security deterrent as Microsoft seems to believe it is for Windows 8, saying, "The real problem, I feel, is that clever hackers will bypass the whole key issue either by getting a key of their own (how many of those private keys have stayed really private again? Oh, that’s right, pretty much none of them) or they’ll just take advantage of security bugs in signed software to bypass it without a key at all."
Source: ZDNet.com