Securing a System During the Boot Process
If a malicious user has physical access to a system, that user can boot a fully functional version of Linux on your servers from a live CD—with full root administrative access. Even without a live CD, some distributions allow a user to boot Linux in single-user mode with full administrative privileges—without a password. (A live CD is a CD or DVD with a bootable operating system. That same data may also be loaded on a USB drive.)
This chapter will assume that the boot process ends once the Linux kernel is loaded on the system. As you’ll see later in this chapter, the startup process continues by loading preconfigured services.
Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI)
It used to be the boot process ...
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