From Newsgroup: alt.os.linux.suse

On 2023-04-04 15:01, bad sector wrote:

On 4/3/23 17:44, Carlos E.R. wrote:

On 2023-04-03 23:16, Malcolm wrote:

On Mon, 3 Apr 2023 15:34:20 -0400
bad sector <forgetski@invalid.org> wrote:

<snip>

It is not protected-mbr, but protective-mbr.

I don't really know what MBR is (seeing that that acronym doesn't
even hint at any physical description) but unlesss I missed something
the once exclusive root sector (a very definitive physical
descriptor) is no longer entirely reserved for booting so only a part
of it may used for that. To me that means truncated in use at least
if not physically.

<snip>
Hi
Master Boot Record where the boot code goes on a dos type disk that
could be hacked, hence the move to gpt and protected mbr boot location.

??????

You can write anything into the MBR, it is not protected in any manner.

You can write anything to any part of any disk. I'm no guru or even a lowercase geek but it seems to me that MBR is not a place, it's a code;

It is a place, its name is MBR. Not "root sector". MBR is not a code.
However, the MBR contains both a partition table and some code. That
doesn't make it "code".

the 'place' is the 'root sector', there never was a place that was the
MBR although many have used the term in that sense. That's my take on it anyway, I'm open to enlightment.

From a security point of view the idea is (or WAS back in the day) to
never leave any place of 'guaranteed-survivability' on any medium for uninvited code and it's in this sense that I'm not sure why I would want
to have an EFI partition that I do not need unless I wiped it every
minute. Today far more sophisticated methods exist but that doesn't make old-school defenses useless.

--
Cheers, Carlos.

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