Gan Shun Lim

Gan Shun Lim

Gan Shun Lim is one of the core developers of Linuxboot and has been working on it since its inception in 2017. Gan has been wrangling with UEFI binary images ever since and started Fiano in an attempt to make UEFI binary modifications simpler and scriptable. Gan studied Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign and joined Google in 2015. Gan has a keen interest in firmware, operating systems, and virtualization.

Fiano: Go Forth and Modify

In this talk we present Fiano, Go-based tools created at Google and Facebook for manipulating UEFI images. Fiano is fast, scriptable, easy to use, and most importantly, does not require you to have UEFI source -- you can modify UEFI ROMs, remove DXEs and, if desired, replace them with a Linux kernel.

Fiano puts you in control of your systems firmware. Even if your BIOS is a blob and outside your control, these tools will help you inspect your firmware (for example, malware analysis) and improve your security.

Fiano can also improve build times, making it possible for individual DXEs to be compiled and inserted into a prebuilt image, avoiding the need to rebuild the entire firmware image.

In the future, we hope to see more systems with a fully open-source firmware stack. Until such time, tools such as Fiano are necessary to give you freedom and act as a stepping stone to bring open-source into your firmware.