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this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2025
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I'm saying this as someone who has a self-signed key + kernel + bootloader + dual boot with windows. I have Arch and I dual boot windows, and the setup was literally three commands.
Enable secure boot setup mode and then do the following:
sbctl create-keys
to create the keyssbctl enroll-keys -m
to enroll the keys to BIOS, including microsoft keyssbctl verify | sed -E 's|^.* (/.+) is not signed$|sbctl sign -s "\1"|e'
to sign everything that needs to be signed.And everything is signed automatically on an update with a pacman hook that comes by default when installing sbctl.
That wiki entry lists all the possible ways to do it, for all combinations of bootloaders and secure boot tools. You only need one of them, for example 3.1.4. which is what I just described.
Cool, good to hear!
A few questions:
I think the part that has me most spooked is the "Replacing the platform keys with your own can end up bricking hardware on some machines" warning.
As for bricking your motherboard, this only happens if your motherboard or any other component uses the microsoft vendor keys as part of the boot sequence, and it's only really a hard brick if it's your motherboard that uses it. If it's any other component, you can remove it and readd the microsoft keys and it'll work again when you add the component back.
And the key part here is replacing the platform keys. If you just always use the -m flag on sbctl enroll-keys, you'll enroll both your own keys and microsoft's, meaning no replacing necessary. If you always use -m, there's no real risk really, because you'll always add the microsoft keys that your hardware might need. Plus, if you're dual booting with windows, you need the -m to have windows secure boot work, anyway.
If you're extra paranoid, you can also add the -f option which should also include all the keys that your motherboard comes with by default, if it contains more than just microsoft's keys, but this shouldn't really be necessary.
Thank you, that's super helpful info.
It is sad to me that that is my situation actually lol. Or rather, a random windows app just wants secure boot to work and is otherwise not worried about evil maid attacks.