Comment by userbinator
5 hours ago
Another breathless fearmongering. "threatens"? No, I don't think network booting is even all that common outside of extremely niche scenarios.
Instead, it applies only to organizations with machines that boot from local networks, or conceivably from Internet-connected resources.
Who is PXE-booting over the open Internet!?
It's a pretty common setup on servers, even if it's not the majority. Probably more commonly it's part of the boot sequence on servers even if it's not used. I would say this is a relevant issue for most organizations' network security because of the risk it represents of being able to escalate from compromising a less privileged machine (e.g. a user's device) to a more privileged machine. It's not a 'oh god every server is going to be pwned' issue, but it doesn't need to be to be worth alerting people to.
Several large bare-metal hosting companies. Not over the open Internet, but that doesn't matter if the management networks are shared and the price of admission a single server rental.
There is also HTTPS boot, which might be a lot more secure than PXE
https://tianocore-docs.github.io/EDKIIHttpsBootGettingStarte...
> No, I don't think network booting is even all that common outside of extremely niche scenarios.
It's incredibly common though? I've run across it and I work on games and client software, not server stuff.
> Another breathless fearmongering.
It's Ars; you come to expect it.