Security News > 2020 > July > BootHole Patches Causing Many Systems to Become Unbootable
It appears that the patches released for Linux distributions in response to the GRUB2 bootloader vulnerability are causing problems for many users, making their systems unbootable.
Completely patching BootHole is not an easy task as it will involve replacing vulnerable bootloaders and updating the Secure Boot revocation list to ensure that the old bootloaders cannot be executed, a process that requires collaboration between multiple software and hardware vendors.
Security researcher Kevin Beaumont reported that major cloud providers such as Azure and Digital Ocean are also seeing systems that fail to boot due to the patches.
"I think there is a genuine conversation to be had about security vulnerabilities and the wider outlook. A primary concern with security is availability. As an industry we also need to be better at careful analysis of vulnerabilities, and staggered testing of patches. The provided solution has again become worse than the vulnerability for most people," Beaumont noted.
Impacted Linux distributions are working on developing new packages and some of them have provided instructions on how users can restore systems impacted by the buggy patches.