Secure Boot was designed to solve one of the most fundamental security problems in computing: how to ensure that only trusted software starts your machine. But like any architectural decision, it came with its own trade-offs, and its own technical debt.In this episode of Technical Debt: Design, Risk and Beyond, Maxim Silaev and Nikita Golovko explore Secure Boot as a case study in how solving one kind of debt often creates another. Maxim explains how the pre-Secure Boot world fragmented BIOS loaders, vendor-specific boot hacks, and no shared trust model, which was itself a form of technical debt waiting to explode. Nikita then breaks down how Secure Boot centralized trust and improved integrity, while introducing new risks: reliance on external signing authorities, firmware lock-ins, and single points of failure.Together, they unpack:How Secure Boot actually works, and why the world before it was pure architectural chaosWhy "centralized trust" solved one problem but created anotherHow dependency on Microsoft’s signing keys became an industry-scale riskWhat communication failures between OEMs, OS vendors, and users taught us about architectural assumptionsHow AI might help us audit and secure firmware chains in the futureWhether you’re in firmware, architecture, or security, this episode shows how even the most well-intentioned design can accumulate invisible debt, and why architecture is as much about people and trust as it is about code.Next episode: How to design architecture specifically to minimize technical debt from the start.Send us a textReach us @ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maxim-silaevhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-nikita-golovko

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