Matthew Garrett

If that's the case then the chip must have restricted write access, which doesn't surprise me. Couldn't you then at least extract the ROM and flash it to a different chip? A chip that doesn't have Secure Boot enabled? Perhaps even try to reverse engineer the firmware directly and strip out the secure boot code? DRM such as SecuROM (much often used in video games) uses SSL and many other forms of cryptography, the same types you have mentioned before. People modify the .exe files at assembly level to remove the DRM from the executable. Perhaps the same thing could potentially be done for Secure Boot? Reverse-engineering such code is not an easy task at all however some (Coreboot) developers can make sense out of some of the compiled assembly instructions from the BIOS.

Obviously not everybody would be soldering their boards left and right to replace the chips but perhaps some progress? At least the deep inter-workings of Secure Boot would be figured out (if this could be done.)