UEFI Secure Boot on the Raspberry Pi

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UPDATE: this post unexpectedly ended up on Hacker News and I received a lot of comments. The two most important points being made are (1) that Secure Boot on the RPi as described here is not actually truly secure. An attacker who successfully gained root could just mount the firmware partition and either add their own keys to the EFI variable store or replace the firmware altogether with a malicious one. (2) The TianCore firmware cannot be used instead of the proprietary blob as I mentioned. What truly happens is that the proprietary blob is loaded onto the VideoCore cores, then TianoCore is loaded onto the ARM cores. Thanks for the corrections.


A port of the free software TianoCore UEFI firmware can be used instead of the proprietary boot blob to boot the Raspberry Pi. This allows to install Debian on the RPi with the standard Debian Installer, and it also makes it possible to use UEFI Secure Boot. Note that Secure Boot had been broken on arm64 for a while, but it’s now working in Bookworm!.

Debian Installer UEFI boot

To begin, you’ll need to download the appropriate firmware files for the RPi3 or RPi4. I’ve got a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ myself, so the rest of this document will assume an RPi3 is being installed.

Plug the SD card you are going to use as the RPi storage device into another system. Say it shows up as /dev/sdf. Then:

# Create an msdos partition table
$ sudo parted --script /dev/sdf mklabel msdos
# Create, format, and label a 10M fat32 partition
$ sudo parted --script /dev/sdf mkpart primary fat32 0% 10M
$ sudo mkfs.vfat /dev/sdf1
$ sudo fatlabel /dev/sdf1 RPI-FW
# Get the UEFI firmware onto the SD card
$ sudo mount /dev/sdf1 /mnt/data/
$ sudo unzip Downloads/RPi3_UEFI_Firmware_v1.38.zip -d /mnt/data/
$ sudo umount /mnt/data

At this point, the SD card can be used to boot the RPi, and you’ll get a UEFI firmware.

Download the Bookworm RC 2 release of the installer, copy it to a USB stick as described in the Installation Guide, and boot your RPi from the stick. If for some reason booting from the stick does not happen automatically, enter the firmware interface with ESC and choose the USB stick from Boot Manager.

Proceed with the installation as normal, paying attention not to modify the firmware partition labeled RPI-FW. I initially thought it would be nice to reuse the firmware partition as ESP partition as well. However, setting the esp flag on makes the RPi unbootable. Either configuring the partition as ESP in debian-installer, or manually with sudo parted --script /dev/sda set 1 esp on, breaks boot. In case you accidentally do that, set it back to off and the edk2 firmware will boot again.

What I suggest doing in terms of partitioning is: (1) leave the 10M partition created above for the firmware alone, and (2) create another 512M or so ESP partition for EFI boot.

The installation should go smoothly till the end, but rebooting won’t work. Doh. This is because of an important gotcha: the Raspberry Pi port of the TianoCore firmware we are using does not support setting UEFI variables persistently from a "High Level Operating System (HLOS)", which is the debian-installer in our case. Persistently is the keyword there: variables can be set and modified regularly — with efibootmgr or otherwise, but crucially the modifications do not survive reboot. However, changes made from the firmware interface itself are persistent. So enter the firmware with ESC right after booting the RPi, select Boot Maintenance ManagerBoot OptionsAdd Boot Option → Your SD card → Your ESP partition → EFIdebianshimaa64.efi. Choose a creative name for your boot entry (eg: "debian"), save and exit the firmware interface. Bookworm should be booting fine at this point!

Enabling Secure Boot

Although the TianoCore firmware does support Secure Boot, there are no keys enrolled by default. To add the required keys, copy PK-0001.der, DB-0001.der, DB-0002.der, KEK-0001.der, and KEK-0002.der to a FAT32 formatted USB stick.

Here’s a summary of the Subject field for each of the above:

PK-0001.der.pem
        Subject: O = Debian, CN = Debian UEFI Secure Boot (PK/KEK key), emailAddress = debian-devel@lists.debian.org
DB-0001.der.pem
        Subject: C = US, ST = Washington, L = Redmond, O = Microsoft Corporation, CN = Microsoft Windows Production PCA 2011
DB-0002.der.pem
        Subject: C = US, ST = Washington, L = Redmond, O = Microsoft Corporation, CN = Microsoft Corporation UEFI CA 2011
KEK-0001.der.pem
        Subject: O = Debian, CN = Debian UEFI Secure Boot (PK/KEK key), emailAddress = debian-devel@lists.debian.org
KEK-0002.der.pem
        Subject: C = US, ST = Washington, L = Redmond, O = Microsoft Corporation, CN = Microsoft Corporation KEK CA 2011

Plug the stick into the RPi, boot and enter the firmware interface with ESC. Select Device ManagerSecure Boot ConfigurationSecure Boot Mode → choose Custom ModeCustom Secure Boot OptionsPK OptionsEnroll PK → choose PK-0001.der. Do the same for DB Options, this time choose DB-0001.der and DB-0002.der. As you may have guessed by now, the same must be done for KEK Options, but adding KEK-0001.der and KEK-0002.der. Save, exit, reboot. If everything went well, your RPi now has booted with Secure Boot enabled.

See https://wiki.debian.org/SecureBoot for the details on how to check whether Secure Boot has been enabled correctly and much more.