{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/securing-the-edk-ii-image-loader","title":"Securing the EDK II Image Loader","arxiv_id":"2012.05471","date":"2020-12-10","proceeding":null,"authors":["Marvin Häuser","Vitaly Cheptsov"],"abstract":"The Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) is a standardised interface between the firmware and the operating system used in all x86-based platforms over the past ten years, which continues to spread to other architectures such as ARM and RISC-V. The UEFI incorporates a modular design based on images containing a driver or an application in a Common Object File Format (COFF) either as a Portable Executable (PE) or as a Terse Executable (TE). The de-facto standard generic UEFI services implementation, including the image loading functionality, is TianoCore EDK II. Its track of security issues shows numerous design and implementation flaws some of which are yet to be addressed. In this paper we outline both the requirements for a secure UEFI Image Loader and the issues of the existing implementation. As an alternative we propose a formally verified Image Loader supporting both PE and TE images with fine-grained hardening enabling a seamless integration with EDK II and subsequently with the other firmwares.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.05471v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2012.05471v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"securing-the-edk-ii-image-loader","repo_url":"https://github.com/mhaeuser/ISPRASOpen-SecurePE","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}